Welcome baby!

Birthday - Japanese tea party

 For the invitation I used a teacup stamp+cutouts from a washi paper (Japanese handmade paper). Inside, a friend of mine wrote "Welcome" in Japanese. 
The text for the invitation I have found on the web (sorry but do not remember where) and it said:

"Wear your finest dress and your mothers pearls we are having a tea party just for the girls"

For the door, I stamped and then scanned the same teacup and let Ella color it. 

 As for a special activity, Ella & I made a swamp with origami cranes, boats and lotus flowers. For the grass we used the plastic dividers commonly used in sushi (bought in 100 yen shop) and Ella made a bird house for the baby cranes. The girls used chopstick to catch as many cranes, flowers or boats as they could.

For the tea cups we used ribbons in different colors/patters so that each girl would recognize their own teacup. The tea was actually juice but it was served from a real teapot.

Halloween - The first one - because you made me do it

So here's my first post thanks to, or because of, my dear talented friend Nela from http://nela-cutnelacut.blogspot.com/
She dared me, in a way, so here it is....

As we used to live in a country where Halloween was rather big, and now we live in one where it is not, our daughter insisted in decorating for the event.

With limited time we produced the following

mostly thanks to other bloggers ideas that I found through http://www.oneprettything.com/

The first one was the Halloween banner that made my finger go numb while cutting (lack of training).You can find this one on http://shishigirl.blogspot.com/2009/10/oh-yeah-halloween-is-coming.html



then we had to have a spooky tree (http://cathiefilian.blogspot.com/2009/10/spooky-tree-halloween-candy-bowl.html)

and my daughter draw some spooky spiders "with green hair & red eyes"

and then came a little pumpkin



Happy Halloween!