Too Cute Not to Toot!

I have to tell you - I have been busy making some projects from past "Too Cute" posts that I'll be sharing soon.  PLUS I have even made one of my OWN ideas!!  Seriously!  Can you believe it?  I'm also getting ready to start searching for some new ideas to work on next month too!

Lets start with this great printable from A Step in the Journey.  I really love the quote and will be printing my own this week.  I'm thinking that I will frame it and hang it above my desk as a daily reminder.  I'll show you once it is hanging up :-)

This next idea I am posting for one person who reads this blog - she got a Kindle Fire this year and mentioned that she hasn't been able to find a good case - well neither could Color Me Glamorous so she MADE one and shared her full tutorial.  Check it out!

I Heart Crafty Things shares an adorable tutorial for making these monster Valentine's Boxes.  In future years, as the boys get older, I plan on have each of us make boxes and then put notes in them through the weeks before the big Heart Day.  A Friend of mine does this with her 8 (yes 8) boys and I just think it is awesome! These boxes are just too great not to make :-)

Thought I would share this adorable idea for a little hot chocolate party.  It is such a simple idea from Dukes and Duchesses.  I think this would be fun to do with the boys after an afternoon of playing in the snow :-)

This is an idea I saw on Pinterest originally but the link sends you to a shop to buy the kit - I didn't want to buy the kit.  Then I found this idea over at And I Thought I loved you Then  with instructions on how to make the Snowball Kit!

So, this really isn't an "idea" but it is a concept and, since it is the plan to finally purchase "My" camera after tax time, I wanted to save this post from Its Overflowing - it's a blogger camera course.  It is the second post - so you can, I'm sure, find the first post and there will also be more.  I'm kinda excited to use it as a base to help me out (Plus I have a friend who has promised to teach me all she knows HA!)

Sassy Sites has done it again.  This time she is sharing a ton of links for ideas to make Valentine's for kids.  I love it for future years - it would be fun to make some of them and put them in those Monster Boxes and mentioned above.!

That's all for this week :-)  People have been kinda quiet this week in bloggy land - I think everyone is still recovering from Christmas :-)

Pinterest Challenge - Success and Not So Much Success

Lets start with the success.  This was a simple idea that came at just the right time.  Last week I posted about the Memory Shortage I had on my hard drive.  I remembered pinning this idea from Real Simple not long ago so I pulled it up and did a little research on this great way to store photo discs.

This just clicked in my brain and was such an easy concept.  Unlike most people (or so it seems) I do not catorgerize my photos by event but rather in chronological order so the color coding of the jewel cases was not something I needed to do but otherwise I loved this idea.  Here is what my simplified version looks like.

Very simply, I burn each year on to a disc (or multiple discs depending on the number of photos) and just put an small index card on the front of the first disc.  I did buy colored cases only because they were cheaper and look more fun in the box!  The box is just a Rubbermaid shoe box which fits the discs perfectly.  I also, as you can read, have "tabs" for the professional picture discs we have had done and I save the copies of the photo pages I create as well. 

Now for the not so much success stories.  Surprisingly, they were both food items.

First up, this recipe for 3 Cheese Chicken Alfredo Bake was one of the very first "pins" and was so excited to make it - it just looked so incredibly yummy! 

I finally got around to making this last week for dinner.  Even while I was making it, it looked good but I kinda wondered what rocatta cheese would do to the texture.  I should of thought a little longer about that concept.  Really, I should have . . oy!

So, do you want to know what the best thing on the plate was?  Nope, not the pasta - it was the garlic bread.  The pasta dish was nasty nasty!  Two reasons.  1)The texture was just not good.  It was kinda chunky and not creamy - that rocatta cheese really messed with the alfredo sauce.  2)The taste - it had none.  It was very bland and non-interesting to eat.  To make it worse, it is actually an expensive dish to put together between the two containers of alfredo (at about $4.00 a container - YIKES!) and all of the cheese . . .not a good one to flop on at all!  So, I would not recommend making this dish personally but, if you want to try it for yourself click on the link I gave above and you will find the recipe there :-)

Now, for the second flop.  Amazingly, it is chocolate and peanut butter - how can you go wrong with that one?  These are called Better Than Crack Brownies which sounds like they should basically make you stand on a mountain peak and sing to the heavens after every bite, right?

So, I whipped a batch of these up with some left over Peanut Butter Cups from Christmas and this is what mine looked like:

I don't think the name suits them and that could be part of the problem - I expected way too much.  They are more like a brownie with some fudge on top.  It's one of those recipes that is just ok - not anything to make again but they weren't awful.  I will say that I used Cocoa Pebbles in the fudgy part instead of Rice Krispies and that probably impacted the texture but not the taste.  You can try them yourself, if you like, by clicking the link above :-)