Pokemon, Pokemon Everywhere!

It's that time of year and we are deep in the midst of party planning. I'm not entirely sure where the love of Pokemon comes from, but it has descended on my son in a big way.

At first he wanted a Bionicle themed party. I was truly at a loss with this one. Then he decided that Pokemon would be a better theme. I had to agree.

Again we pulled out the Cricut machine for making the invitations. This year my son was able to help even more. He pushed all the buttons and helped to load and unload the paper. It's not a terribly complicated design, but it was fun to create. The middle circle kind of pops up a bit from the big one so it looks a little more 3-dimensional.

I'm hoping the party will be a success like last year. We have a magician planned and a fun cake design in the works.

Every clay cloud has a silver lining...

Or sometimes the clay is embedded with silver. This is my first attempt at working with Precious Metal Clay. It starts out with a small ball of clay and can be molded or shaped just like any other clay. It is dried out a bit and then either fired with a torch or in a kiln and the clay burns off leaving pure silver. After firing it can be sanded and buffed some to bring out the shine of the silver.

The Maker Faire was here in town a few weeks ago and one of the exhibits was a school that teaches jewelry making. They were giving mini classes so it was a great opportunity to work with PMC for the first time. I have lots of supplies to do my own thing but sometimes a new material or technique is intimidating for me. This gave me a little taste of what working with PMC is like. It was a great introduction. I'm looking forward to making some more things on my own.

Are all your eggs in one basket? Or just on a platter?

It's been a while, so time to update here. The Easter Bunny has come and gone. This is our platter of eggs we decorated. New technique this year was blowing the insides of the eggs out and just decorating empty shells. It made for a bit more fragile product, but it was nice not to have to worry about having the eggs out for any length of time. We were also able to enjoy the decorated eggs for a lot longer.

Decorating with a kidlet is always fun and you never know what combinations he'll come up with. Martha has nothing on him.