DIY Wreath: Christmas or Not

I hope you all had a GREAT holiday!  I am still celebrating - but hope to be back to my normal blogging routine soon. :) I hope you all can continue to spend a little family time cozied up next to a fire or out doing something fun.  And if stuck inside, I have a DIY project you can make all year around!  A yarn wreath.

 It doesn't need to be Christmas to make this!  I made a couple that can be hung year around, or simply edit the yarn & felt colors to coordinate with any upcoming holidays.  I'm just LOVING my yarn wreaths, so thought I'd share what I made and how to make them for an easy, fun project.

To make something like this:

 or 

What you need:

Yarn - I used Jiffy sweater yarn (it's a little fuzzy)

Straw wreath (made a couple with various sizes) - keep plastic wrap on

Felt (for flowers to adorn the yarn wreath)

And a little muscle...

Get comfy and just wrap the yarn around and around and around the wreath.  You will use at least one package of yarn (for small - medium wreath sizes).  The fuzzier yarn helps to hide gaps - but use any kind you want. To start and finish, just wrap the yarn around and with the end, tie a knot.  The knot will blend in to the rest of the yard - but I put mine in the back.

Once the wreath is covered in yard, you can adorn anyway you want!  I chose with felt flowers. I added red ones in there to be a little festive, but mixed with white and gray and the green/teal yarn base can be hung year around!

I started with a cut square of felt and then trimmed the edges in a wave motion:

The bigger the square (or rectangle in my case), the bigger the flower.

Then I cut in a circular to make a long ribbon, leaving an "eye' or little round/oval part in the middle, like so:

Then you take the end (non-eye end) and start forming the center of the flower - just continue to roll the felt up! I found this tutorial and idea for the Yarn Wreath at Take Heart.

They seem a little Anthropologie to me!  Enjoy!

30th Birthday Party

Last Friday, my husband turned 30!  That's a good age to mark with a party, so after getting his input, we decided to have a casual beer & scotch (his current favorite liquor) party, complete with food, beer pong and flip cup.

Here were a few highlights:

Triple layer chocolate cake from CostCo (birthday boy's pick, because it's amazing), topped with beer bottle cap happy 30th bday sign crafted by moi:

Besides chocolate cake, I made Chocolate Oatmeal bars and we had Beer Mug Sugar cookies individually wrapped up so that people could eat then or take as a parting souvenir.

These super cute, and amazingly good cookies were made by Kelsey at Sweet Cakes.  Clickity click on over to her blog to see the many other cookie creations she's done and if you are in the Kansas City area - hit her up.  She takes custom orders and you won't be let down!

Besides the desserts, we had a Soft Pretzel Bar:

I got frozen soft pretzels (you can find in any grocery freezer isle near the frozen breads and rolls) and the provided several different dipping options to try:

Pale Ale Mustard (a local brewery's beer mustard), Stone Ground Mustard, cheese (the kind you find near the chips for dipping or nachos), melted chocolate and then created my own cinnamon sugar sauce, that I really liked.

Cinnamon Sauce: 1 single serving of vanilla Greek yogurt mixed with 1 TBS of cinnamon, 1 TBS of sugar or Splenda, 1 TBS of brown sugar (or you can do each to taste).

I got my pretzel, tore it up and tried all the dips (except cheese):

The Scotch bar was a hit (among the boys...the girls stuck to the wine area):

And then there was a ton of beer - all kinds of cool beer, home-brewed beers, local, micro, etc:

(This photo was taken before most of the guests arrived.  This was just 1/8th of the visible beer.  We also had beer in the "beer" fridge you see and our regular fridge.)

We had macro/cheaper beers downstairs in a cooler for the beer drinking games.

Overall, I think we made my hubs start to his thirties pretty fun. :)