Gifts for birthdays (and for me!)

I've been wanting to make this necklace for a while now. In fact, I bought the pearls at a thrift store some time last summer, with something like this in mind. So, when my pearl loving friend's birthday came around this year, I knew just what to make!

The set...


Necklace detail


Earrings.

Also noticed that the lighting/my camera suck for these. Bummer.

And here's what I made for myself:

They all look much better in real life. :)

Finally, just because... my future sister-in-law showed me some sweet stitch counters she got on Etsy, and the obvious dawned on me, and I happened to have an adorable glass bead I'd been holding on to for no particular reason, and because I'd been using a small piece of blue yarn to mark my stitcues instead, and because... oh, bother... I made these:

(gotta start taking nicer photos)

Mmm baby!

Cupcakes! For Easter, my friend and I attempted to make Bakerella's super sweet cake balls. We failed pretty miserably (baking + drinking = ugly baked goods). They were still tasty, but not cute by any stretch of the imagination. A couple of weeks ago, I got ambitious again and decided to try cupcake bites instead. They basically consist of cake & icing, mashed up and then covered in chocolate, to look like miniature cupcakes. Sugary, sweet and yummy! Four hours of baking, melting, decorating, swearing, and washing my fingers after licking them later, I wound up with these little guys...

Tiny!

Next time, I will buy more chocolate molds (I had to make 11 at a time!) and, for sure, I'm enlisting help!