Aprons for my mama and sister

This is the apron I made for my mama for Christmas. It's the Emmeline pattern as well, and was made from a repurposed Shabby Chic sheet that I found at Dirt Cheap (for $3). It's the same on both sides.


I made this one for my middle sister. Didn't I say that the Emmeline is my new favorite pattern? One side is a repurposed hot pink sheet I found at Dirt Cheap ($3 again), the other side is the rest of the Shabby Chic sheet.


I also made a really cute half apron for my youngest sister, but forgot to take a picture of it. It was made from a repurposed pink and brown pillow sham. I really do love repurposing (is that a word?) fabric for a new use!

HAPPY NEW YEAR'S EVE!!! Have fun and be safe.

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I'm on Twitter now. If you wanna follow me, I'm mc_cupcake. You can thank my husband for that one. :-)

Christmas Sassy Apron swap

This is the apron I made for the winter Sassy Apron Swap.
I wanted to make sure my swap partner, Christy, received the apron before I posted about it, and I got a very sweet thank you from her yesterday.

The theme was "cookies," so I went with gingerbread, y'all know how I am about gingerbread! The pattern is the Emmeline apron from Sew Liberated. It's my new favorite apron pattern.

The fabric on the front of the apron is a really cute Christmas cookie print.


And the back is that cute gingham check that I just love. I figured that she could wear it with this side showing after Christmas, and be able to use it a little longer.


This is the gingerbread man card I made to go with the apron.


I also included some gingerbread man cookies, the recipe for them, and a gingerbread man cookie cutter, as well as a little snow globe and a gingerbread scented candle (that I of course forgot to take pictures of).

My next several posts will be of the Christmas gifts I made for my family. I've really enjoyed making all of the gifts this year, even though it was stressful at times. I'm going to start working on next year's gifts around June!

I hope you all have a fun New Year's Eve!

Best Christmas present EVAR!

As always, it's been a while between postings. I've been really busy and have a lot of pictures and stuff to show you, but it will probably take a few posts to get caught up. So to tide you over till I get something more interesting up,(haha) I thought I would show you the best Christmas present ever. The awesome Cuisinart Supreme™ Commercial Quality Ice Cream Maker.



It is freakin' sweet!!! It's in there churning away as I type. We've had it 2 days and this is the second time we've used it. I've got a feeling I'm gonna gain some weight from all the ice cream I'm gonna be eating. Mr. McHacker's mom and dad gave it to us, and they are awesome. Not just for giving us the coolest gift ever, they're just awesome in general.

We're still at Mom and Dad McHacker's and I finally told Mom about the blog. She's the first person in my family to know about it. So, HI MOM!

I've really enjoyed reading about everyone's Christmas experiences and I'm looking forward to sharing mine with you. I hope everyone is having a great weekend. Type to you later!

I'm an Ingrid and I love Mad Men

Hippie Family posted this quiz,Are You a Jackie or a Marilyn? Or Someone Else? Mad Men-era Female Icon Quiz.
I love that era and the quiz mentioned Mad Men (which is an awesome show, btw). So, I took it and here are my results:

You Are an Ingrid!

"I am unique"
Ingrids have sensitive feelings and are warm and perceptive.

How to Get Along with Me

• * Give me plenty of compliments. They mean a lot to me.
• * Be a supportive friend or partner. Help me to learn to love and value myself.
• * Respect me for my special gifts of intuition and vision.
• * Though I don't always want to be cheered up when I'm feeling melancholy, I sometimes like to have someone lighten me up a little.
• * Don't tell me I'm too sensitive or that I'm overreacting!

What I Like About Being an Ingrid

• * my ability to find meaning in life and to experience feeling at a deep level
• * my ability to establish warm connections with people
• * admiring what is noble, truthful, and beautiful in life
• * my creativity, intuition, and sense of humor
• * being unique and being seen as unique by others
• * having aesthetic sensibilities
• * being able to easily pick up the feelings of people around me

What's Hard About Being an Ingrid

• * experiencing dark moods of emptiness and despair
• * feelings of self-hatred and shame; believing I don't deserve to be loved
• * feeling guilty when I disappoint people
• * feeling hurt or attacked when someone misundertands me
• * expecting too much from myself and life
• * fearing being abandoned
• * obsessing over resentments
• * longing for what I don't have

Ingrids as Children Often

• * have active imaginations: play creatively alone or organize playmates in original games
• * are very sensitive
• * feel that they don't fit in
• * believe they are missing something that other people have
• * attach themselves to idealized teachers, heroes, artists, etc.
• * become antiauthoritarian or rebellious when criticized or not understood
• * feel lonely or abandoned (perhaps as a result of a death or their parents' divorce)

Ingrids as Parents

• * help their children become who they really are
• * support their children's creativity and originality
• * are good at helping their children get in touch with their feelings
• * are sometimes overly critical or overly protective
• * are usually very good with children if not too self-absorbed

Speaking of Mad Men, I am a big fan. Somehow, I don't remember how exactly, I came across this Flickr page of Mad Men illustrations that can be used as computer wallpapers and such. I just love them. If you've ever seen the show, I think you'll love them too.

More gingerbread stuff and another cake

In my last post I told you all about making gingerbread men and volunteering in Kidzone. After I had seen the last group of kids on Wednesday, I decorated a gingerbread train that I had made at home and brought to school for the librarian to use for her RIF project. About three times a year, she is able to give away a free book to each child through the Reading is Fundamental program. Instead of just giving them a book, she chooses a theme and has activities to go with it and each class gets to go to the auditorium and participate in the activities for about 45 minutes, then they choose a book.

I took the train and decorated it on Wednesday because I wasn't planning on going back Thursday and Friday. After I finished it, around four o'clock, I took it over to the auditorium. The librarian was busy working on setting up the props for the gingerbread themed RIF on Friday. She had a lot left to do, so I stayed until five o'clock helping her. I thought about her all evening, wondering how she was going to manage to put together the life size gingerbread house she was working on and also teach her classes on Thursday. So, I got up early Thursday and went to the school to help her out. She was so surprised and so happy to have the help. So I spent the day Thursday constructing a gingerbread house out of refrigerator boxes, butcher paper, and a few other things. Then I was invited to go with went to the faculty to the school Christmas dinner. I went and had a good time and spent the night with my friend E. since I was planning on coming back Friday morning to help out with the RIF program. We put the finishing touches on everything Friday morning and had a great day.

Here are some pictures of the train.




And here are some pictures of the auditorium all decorated up for RIF. The house is about five and a half feet tall. There's the train on the left.





Friday night Mr. McHacker, myself, E., and her husband went over to a friend's house for a little get-together with some other folks. It was a lot of fun, we actually ended up spending the night because we drank a little too much. Needless to say, we were pretty much good-for-nothing on Saturday. Sunday, I got caught up on all of the housework that had been neglected during the week.

Monday, I baked a cake for a baby shower and went back to the school to take the cake to the party. Here's a picture. In case you can't read it, it says,
"Tiny fingers, tiny toes,
Little, itty bitty clothes,
Football, baseball, lots of toys,
Oh thank heaven,
For little boys!"


Tuesday I started feeling a little under the weather, got continually worse, and am still sick. Hopefully, I will get over it, soon. I have so many Christmas presents left to make!

I'm really going to try to get that apron made for a giveaway before Christmas, but if I don't, I'll still do a non-Christmas apron giveaway in January. I have good intentions, I just don't know if I have enough time!

I hope I'll be able to stay caught up on blog posts now! I hope you're enjoying your Sunday!

An apron, a cake, and lots of gingerbread men

(Continuation of yesterday's post)

The week after decorating Kidzone to look like Christmas in Germany, was the week of Thanksgiving. I had a couple of lazy days, but that week was pretty busy as well.

I made an apron for the Holiday Hostess Flirty Apron Swap. After reading my partner's blog, I decided on making her a frilly, flirty, over-the-top, pink, hostess apron. I was kind of afraid it would end up looking like a tutu, but I think it turned out okay. My partner sent me a really sweet thank you note and she really seemed to like it.




I also made a birthday cake for a Sweet 16 party. The colors don't look quite right in the picture, they were brighter, more of a lime green and hot pink, but you get the idea.


I went over to my friend E.'s mom's house and helped her kids make Christmas cookies, but didn't get any pictures of that. They had so much fun!

My in-laws came up for Thanksgiving on Friday instead of Thanksgiving day, and we fried a turkey and I made lots of other goodies to go with it. Our friends R. and L. came over and joined us for dinner too. No pictures of that either, but we all had a good time. :-)

The weekend after Thanksgiving was spent making LOTS of gingerbread men. Since gingerbread is sort of a German thing, I thought it would be fun for the kids to make something gingerbread related, and the Kidzone teacher was more than happy for me to volunteer to come in and lead a center. So I made a gingerbread cookie for every child in the school, and when they came to my center in Kidzone, they got to decorate it and eat it while I read The Gingerbread Man to them. I did this Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday, and was able to interact with all of the students in the school, about 250 kids in all. It took a lot of time and effort, but it was so worth it to see how much fun they had! I wish I could show you their faces in the pictures!





I was also there Thursday and Friday helping out the librarian with her RIF project. I'll tell you all about that tomorrow! I hope you're all having a great weekend!

So it's been a while...

Yeah it's been a while since I've posted anything. I've thought about it, every day actually. Part of my reason for not posting is that I've been busy. When I got over being so busy, I just wanted to be lazy. And for the past several days, I've been sick. So, what have I been up to since I last posted? Where do I start? It may take me a couple of posts to get caught up.

A couple of weeks ago, I was asked to help out one of the special area teachers at the school I used to work at, and now volunteer at quite often. They have a really great hands-on, kid's museum type of thing that they got a grant to for several years ago. It's called Kidzone. Inside Kidzone, there are replicas of a bank (with a teller counter, and deposit and withdrawal slips to help the kids learn about money), a Piggly Wiggly (with aisles full of artificial food, and empty boxes, and a cash register so the kids can grocery shop and play cashier), and a McDonalds (well sort of, the back wall is like a mural of what it looks like behind the counter, and there's a cash register and a bunch of empty food containers, also to help with learning about money). There is also a kitchen where the Kidzone teacher, or classroom teacher, can cook with the students. It's pretty impressive actually. In addition to the neat centers, the Kidzone teacher does three units a year on a Social Studies or Science theme, including lots of props, decorations, and hands-on activities. The teacher who taught it since it was started retired at the end of the school year last year, and they hired a new teacher for this year (I wanted the job, but that's another story for another time). But before she left, the retiring teacher helped the incoming teacher set up the unit for the beginning of school. The theme had to be changed at the end of November and the new teacher needed lots of help doing that. That's where I come in. This is turning into a much longer backstory than I anticipated! Sorry 'bout that folks.
So anyway, I spent the week before Thanksgiving helping her transform Kidzone from a Native American setting to Christmas in Germany (I'm supposed to be getting paid for this, but I don't know how much or when I'll actually get the money). It was a lot of work, but it turned out really well. I wish I had before and after photos of everything, but I don't. I do have pictures of some other things that I want to share with you though, so I'll resume with this tomorrow.