Crafts: Zachariah's Rockin' Party

If you are ever in need of custom guitar picks, I recommend this company to order from. The order shipped fast and there were 72 picks in the bag when I only ordered 60 for $32.99.

Template of the picks

Actual picks were a hit.

A few of the guitar picks were used in a jar to "Guess how many picks in the jar" as a game. I also hot glued extra strength magnets to the back of a few of them so we could play "Pin the pick on the guitar". The others were put in thank you cards for guests to keep.

Outline, freehand.

All acrylic paint, handpainted.

Pin the pick on the guitar was as blast, although the $9 magnetic spray paint was not worth it. We just used our fingers to hold the picks in place as we played. 

Crafts: Zachariah's Smash Cake Decor

The smash cake session for my nephew was beyond adorable. Here's what we did.

We used a silver plastic table cloth from Oriental Trading and hung it from a wall using masking tape, draping the cloth onto the floor to protect it from cake debris, and taping it to the floor as well. This was an awesome setup because after the smashing, all we had to do was remove the props and roll all the mess up and straight into the trash. Easy clean-up!


I found wood cut letters at walmart and used black spray paint around the edges and blue acrylic paint on the face to spell out his name and hung them from under the windowsill.

The piñata is hand cut from a cardboard box, covered with fringed tissue paper and 2 glue sticks worth of glue. The key to a sturdy piñata is to work with the shape of the box. I never cut the corner on the base where it attached to the front. Or the two side pieces on the bottom of the 1. After marking the piñata in 1 in bands all the way around, I alternated 2 strips of dark blue with 1 strip of light blue tissue paper and filled in any sparse areas. Since this was just a decorative piece and not an actually candy holding, hitting piñata, I didn't have to keep a fill hole. I did still add a loop of string in case we were to hang it somewhere.

Toss in 3 balloons of coordinating colors.

Baby Shower Spice Cake Cupcakes

The second treat featured at the baby shower were these Spice Cake Cupcakes with Cream Cheese frosting, blue sugar crystals and cupcake picks. I used blank 4x6" index cards and created the circles and words in Microsoft Paint to make the cake picks. I printed them out in doubles, cut around each circle then glued them together with a toothpick in the middle.

I also created the signs for the treats and folded them in half. I did not get a chance to make fresh cinnamon buns-from-the-oven however, I was too exhausted from two days of baking and decorating to pull that off.

I used the 1M Wilton swirl technique with a 10" decorating bag and a star tip 195 (?). The cupcake stand is a cardboard, assemble yourself Wilton kit that I added some of the same It's a Boy! ribbon to with a hot glue gun.

I grouped the cake picks on each level of the cupcakes and voila!

Baby Shower Sugar Cookies

My sister had her baby shower at 23 weeks on December 1st. We decided to have it so early because she is due in March and didn't want to have people driving in the snow in January. I volunteered to do decorations and make the sweets. The baby's nickname is Sugar until she can pick a name for her little boy. The nursery is going to be guitar/rock 'n roll theme. So her best friend and I decided we would do sugar and spice and everything nice, snips and snails and puppy dog tails, and focus more on the boy theme of it. We also incorporated a playlist based around the sugar theme and Def Leppard's Pour Some Sugar on Me (since it is a baby shower for the mom) was our rock 'n roll choice.

My idea was already set around sugar cookies and some kind of spice cake. I had seen some baby onesie cookie cutters and the cookies were made into pops. I knew that would be fun! I used Betty Crocker sugar cookie mix (1 large and 1 small bag) to make 20 cookies total since we were unsure of a final head count. I used Wilton color flow mix and followed the directions for regular consistency and flow consistency. This was dyed blue with Wilton food coloring in royal blue. I used tip 1 for the outline and once the icing was thinned a used a larger petal tip to fill in and a toothpick to spread to all the edges.

I was going to add Baby and the snaps to the onesie once the color flow had dried but I had spent 8 hours working on these cookies and gave up. It took a lot of flour on the cutting board and rolling pin to keep from sticking. I rolled the dough out to 1/4", cut the shape, placed it on the cookie sheet with parchment paper, placed a stick 3/4 of the way up the length of the cookie, cut another and placed it on top. Make sure to get out any air bubbles between the layers and around the stick or your baby will look like it has a hernia.

Once the cookies had cooled enough to be iced, that was allowed to harden for a few hours. The next day I wrapped them in treat bags and tied a ribbon around them to tie them closed.

At the party we couldn't think of a cute way to display these so we just made a pile with a cute sign in front.

Aren't they adorable? They were a hit and since the turnout was small, everybody took some home with them.