Birthday Weekend for Michael

Michael's Birthday was on Sunday and we started celebrating on Thursday night with a special birthday SBiG. We watched Hobo With a Shotgun and had pizza and a very sad German Chocolate cake.

I don't know what happened with the cake. We did use a milk chocolate cake mix instead of German chocolate. But I didn't think that would matter...

The cake just fell apart. All over the kitchen!

Saturday morning I made a homemade pop tart recipe from Smitten Kitchen, recommended by Paul. Here is the link: Homemade Pop Tart's.

I used a roasted apple filling recipe that I found here. And I just thinned some powdered sugar with milk for the icing. They were pretty good and the crust was absolutely delicious. But I made them way too thick. After eating one pop tart you feel like you've consumed an entire apple pie. Also the filling was a little spicy for our taste. I would cut the cinnamon back to 1/2 teaspoon and the nutmeg to 1/4 teaspoon. But the long-roasted apple flavor was really good!

Then we headed out to shop for wardrobe for our upcoming short, Prey. We checked out a couple thrift stores and didn't find anything and then we headed over to Everything A Deal (AKA "The Chola Store") to pick up some outfits for the girls. We found some great stuff and Michael has pics posted on his blog.

When we got home I decided that I needed to make a Birthday banner. I love those paper banners that say Happy Birthday. I always pick them up at the dollar store and just toss them afterward. Well I started thinking about how wasteful that is. I've probably gone through close to a hundred party banners over the years for birthdays and other occasions. So, I started working on the Bacon family Birthday Banner. I had some bags of felt scraps and craft squares left-over from different projects. So I pulled those out and started free-handing block letters. There are 13 letters in Happy Birthday!

Then I tried to coordinate the pennant colors with the letter colors the best I could with the bigger felt pieces I had. And like the crazy person that I am I hand-appliqued each letter on each pennant with 3 strands of embroidery floss. But I'm so glad that I did because there is just something about felt appliqued with a blanket stitch that I LOVE. It feels like home to me.

For now, the pennants are all just pinned on to a 4-strand braid of some white chirstmas yarn that has silver glitter in it. I'll probably end up had stitching them on to the yarn with color coordinated embroidery floss.

I'm happy that we have a Birthday Banner for every birthday from now on. No more wasting paper banners for us! :) It's kinda like our Birthday plate. When it's your birthday you get to use the special plate for all your meals (and cake).

Michael's actual birthday was on Sunday, and we had waffles with homemade strawberry sauce and then just relaxed at home all day. He ate his on the birthday plate.

Happy Birthday my love!

Happy Birthday To Me!

Well, my birthday was actually on Wednesday, the 31st but I'm just now writing about it. I had a WONDERFUL birthday. Thanks to everyone who left Happy Birthday comments for me on Myspace and Facebook, and all the calls and texts. It's nice to know so many people remember me! I feel loved! :)

Michael and I slept in as we've been doing lately since we've both been on vacation since before Christmas and we're both total night owls. We had brunch/lunch at The Studio Diner which we just call "The Diner". Kelly and I used go there almost every Sunday for breakfast when we were roommates because it's just down the street from the condo. It's really good diner food and fun movie-making atmosphere. Michael and I LOVE it but we haven't been in a long time. Then he took me to Ikea for my birthday present. He got me the Aneboda chest! YIPPEE! I learned about it at Kristy's sewing blog. And have been longing for it since I first read her post. Believe it or not I actually have fewer patterns that she does, but that just leaves me plenty of room for my pattern collection to grow. :) I'm so lucky to have a man that buys me practical sewing furniture two years in a row for my birthday! Thanks my love!

Aunt Deb got me a beautiful owl kingdom chess set for my birthday and Michael taught me how to play while we had birthday cake.

Then we watched the ball drop in Times Square on TV and that was the end of our lovely relaxing day!