birthday weekend

A few snapshots from the weekend. Lovely cards, a panama hat and clothes from a clever husband (he had the dress made and screen-printed for me at one of my favorite shops!), a beautiful brunch at José Andrés Tres complete with mimosas and bloody marys, and sweet presents from dear friends.

Hope you've had a wonderful weekend, too!

mini cake bunting

These are terrible, terrible photos of something I made that I actually really liked.

I've always wanted to try making mini cake bunting, so I decided to host a swap for it, thinking it would force me to commit to actually doing it. My partner crafty cupcake likes a lot of feminine and vintage things, so I decided to make hers out of pretty printed fabric, vintage lace, beads, and vintage flowers.

The problem was that I've been so distracted lately that I left the project until pretty late in the game and didn't have the chance to take proper photos of it! Silly me. Oh well, I'm glad I have some photographic record of it...and I suppose I could actually make myself one sometime, too.

shopper alert: vintage circus cupcake papers

The circus is in town! Or it's at Michaels, anyway. One of the members of my cupcake toppers group alerted everyone to some super cute cupcake liners that have vintage circus designs. I pawed through a lot of displays by the baking section until I finally found them in the bargain bins at the unbelievable price of $1.50 per 75-count pack! They're adorable, and there are also matching treat bags, stickers, cards, mini journals, and rubber stamps too.

This is going to be great, because I just posted a Mary Poppins circus in the sky pendant necklace swap in our children's lit swap group that I'm very excited about. I can use the stamps and stickers and such to gussy up the package when the time comes. I think I might use a cupcake liner in a craft for a special somebody, too--I'll have to see. In the meantime, the rest go into the baking cupboard. You'd think we baked cupcakes all the time, but it's really just a few times a year. It's so hard to resist a pretty liner, though.

more valentine cupcake toppers

My friend Naomi sent me some cute cupcake toppers for the Sweetly Vintage Valentine Toppers swap recently. As I've mentioned, we keep getting partnered in swaps, which is kind of nice because then you know you'll be getting a good package in the mail.

Naomi used adorable stickers to make her toppers along with the pleating technique I used for the holiday toppers I made for Christmas. They're so pretty and so sweet! She also sent me some wonderful glittery Valentine postcards from Cavallini and Company, which I'd seen in stores and really liked. She  was also clever enough to write a note on one of them, knowing full well, I expect, that this would give me license to actually keep it.

In other news, my husband is finally home after a month away, plus my gentlemen friends were staying with us for a few days while they were in town, so it's been a little nutty around here lately. Hopefully things are back to normal, however...I've missed the blogosphere!

valentine cupcake toppers + download

I make way more cupcake toppers than I do cupcakes. That's probably a good thing, though sometimes it's hard to remember the need for moderation when you have so many cute toppers lying around.

I hosted a Sweetly Vintage Valentine Toppers swap on Swap-Bot recently, and here are the ones I sent to my partner. I love this assortment of sized-down old penny valentines, which includes a mermaid and a veggie since my partner is a fan of both.

I'm also including a link where you can download a copy of these cupcake toppers and print onto cardstock if you'd like to make your own.  They are easy to embellish with glitter, ribbons, lace, or whatever you'd like!

vintage holiday cupcake toppers: tutorial + free download

For those of you hosting holiday parties (or who need one-of-a-kind hostess gifts!), why not dress up your baked treats with cupcake toppers? I've made a few sets this year and it's a very quick, rewarding craft...and it's so much less expensive to make your own than to purchase them. Since the two previous cupcake topper swaps I'd hosted this year got such a great response, I decided to start a Dress that Cupcake! group.

Our first swap was a holiday themed lucky parcel. My partner HoneyBunny is a really creative cook (she shared a delicious recipe for clam-stuffed shrimp with me recently that is now one of our favorites) so I was looking forward to making something for her. Since she is a fan of vintage, I thought it would be nice to make toppers that looked very old-fashioned using images from vintage Christmas cards.

I really like how they turned out, since the crinkly tissue paper adds to the impression that you might have just found them in a box in the attic somewhere. Except they're much less dusty and iffy for your dessert table.

If you'd like to make your own, I've posted a simple tutorial below and uploaded a copy of the cupcake topper images as a pdf here. Just be sure to use them for good (your own personal use) not evil (commercial use), please!

Vintage Holiday Cupcake Toppers Tutorial

Materials & Tools:

1 sheet of vintage holiday images
scissors
tape
1 sheet of tissue paper in a coordinating color
glue stick
blank cardstock ovals

Directions:

1. To make the cupcake toppers, print out a copy of the vintage holiday images onto cardstock and cut around them.

2. Center a toothpick with approximately a third of the stick on the back of the each topper and firmly tape it in place. Smooth out air bubbles with your fingers and make sure it's fastened tightly.

3. Fold tissue paper a few times and cut into long 1/4 inch strips.

4. Flip your toppers over and working from the back, accordion-pleat the tissue strips around the edge of the cardstock. Carefully tape them down every inch or so, and snip off the excess tissue when you reach the end.

5. Cut cardstock ovals of approximately the same size as the vintage images. Using a good glue stick, cover the plain ovals with paste and place onto the back of each topper. Firmly press into place with your fingers, taking care to smooth around and above the toothpick.

Voila! Easy peasy craft with very pretty results.

I packaged the toppers up in a glassine bag and also made a little cake banner using the "Wishing you the sweetest holiday" greeting along with two short bamboo skewers. Since it was a lucky parcel, I also included a batch of candy buttons I made using a Bake it Pretty mold, some snowflake cupcake wrappers, a set of "Baked With Love By..." labels, and a few little trinkets and candies for additional decor. I put then everything into a recycled plastic container that I decorated with striped paper and cupcake-themed deco tape. I hope HoneyBunny enjoys her package...and that you'll enjoy making these toppers, too!

more halloween cupcake toppers

Received from Stevie over at Crafty Cupcake: one set of super cute cupcake toppers, made with copies of vintage Halloween images! I sent my toppers out last week, and was excited to receive this little packet in return. I just love when swap partners take the time to look over my profile and tailor their craft to my likes, as Stevie certainly did here.

The images really pop with all the warm colors and the cats and pumpkins and kids, and I really love how much thought went into this. Thanks so much Stevie!

halloween packages

Two dreadful packages will be departing from the honeybee household this week: spooky, spooky mail and Halloween cupcake toppers.

Halloween is such a fun holiday, and we used to throw lots of parties and decorate like mad. We've toned it down a bit in the last few years just because it's been so busy and we have to pull everything out of storage. But this year I'm compensating by having a ball with mailing decorated packages instead.


For the first swap, I put together a parcel of spooky Halloween goodies that included:

-- decorated and embossed straws
-- tea-dyed "destroyed" tags that were stamped + glittered
-- stamped mini Trick or Treat tags
-- a ghastly postcard with scary movie suggestions
-- a recipe
-- a spidery pad
-- stickers
-- a little tin of vintage Halloween images
-- candy
-- and a few other fun items.

I decorated the bubble envelope with tons of stickers, stamped images, and black skull CAUTION tape from the Martha Stewart 2010 Halloween collection.

The second package was also really fun to do. The last cupcake toppers swap got such a great response that I had to hold another one, this time with a Halloween theme.

My partner is actually Rachel, the wonderful founder of Swap-Bot, and I made two sets of Halloween cupcake toppers for her using images from Martha's Halloween stamps. For the candy ones (and for the decorated straws above), I used the MSL heating tool to emboss each topper, which created a cool and shiny raised effect. (By the way, I've tried to use a hair dryer to do this...it doesn't work. The tool is very easy to use and the images set fairly quickly.) I also included a set of 6 Halloween invitations that I stamped and packaged up in a glassine envelope.

I hope both partners enjoy getting their Halloween packages! They were lots of fun to make.

more cupcake toppers

Most of the time when I participate in swaps, I don't really even think about what I'm going to receive in return. That is, I generally do join ones where there are things I'd like to make/receive, but I don't really go into any one with any big expectations.

So it's always with a great deal of delight when something arrives that really tickles my fancy...like these fun cupcake toppers that my partner Michelle made for me! The red cherries are flocked, glittered, trimmed in rick-rack, and best of all, the scallop-punched back was cut out of what appears to be an old cookbook. So cute, and exactly right for me.

The toppers were packaged in a little ribbon-wrapped packet of bubble wrap and tied with a sweet note. I can't wait to make some cupcakes so I can pretty them up with these. Thank you, Michelle!

A few of the ladies who participated in my cupcake toppers swap were also nice enough to send me photos of the toppers they made. It's very fun to see how they personalized the toppers for their partners, and how everyone interpreted the concept. It looks like there will be a lot of fancy cupcakes dressing up tables in the near future.

Thanks to (starting from top left in rows) Bobbi, the honey pie tree, Laurie, Trish, Stacy, Carrie, Karen, Laurie (again!), and Sara  for sharing what they made. Your partners were lucky to have you!

owl cupcake toppers

I love cupcakes! Especially ones that are fluffy and not too sweet. We had some delicious mini ones this weekend from Hotcakes Bakes, a bakery we'd driven past many times but never stopped in.

I really liked the mint chocolate chip one, which tasted just like an Andes candy, and the strawberry one, which reminded me of a strawberry shortcake Good Humor ice cream bar. Turns out the bakery actually won Cupcake Wars last year, and with good reason.

I recently decided I'd also like to try making my own cupcake toppers. They're all the rage these days and there are many cute ones available for purchase, but...why not make your own? And why not make it with other crafty peeps? So I hosted a cupcake toppers swap recently on Swap-Bot, in which participants were invited to make a dozen toppers specifically for their partners.

My partner Bobbi in Kansas really likes owls, and since the ones I'd chosen for the swap graphic were ones I'd banned (darn!) I had to find something else to use. I came across some vintage cards with charming owl illustrations and printed them out to make a set of Halloween cupcake toppers, mounting them on scalloped colored cardstock and using plain wooden toothpicks.

They were so much fun to make that I had to do another set..this time using cheery owl Valentines I shrank down from style crush. They were paired with multi-colored toothpicks and backed with plain white cardstock to be used as cute Valentine cupcake toppers (or really, for any sweet occasion). Both sets were packaged in clear cello bags and fastened with a personalized packet label. I hope Bobbi enjoys them.

This was such an easy and fun project to do, so I think there will definitely be more cupcake topper-making in my future. Which means that there will also be...more cupcakes!