Hot Air Balloon Birthday Party

I had a bunch of winning pins this week! My precious little babies turn 1 year old TODAY so we had a little family birthday party on Sunday.

I had a whole board for their Hot Air Balloon Party. The pins I ended up using were this one  for centerpieces, and the rest for inspiration. I bought this printable party decoration package from Etsy and it turned out super cute! I didn't do as much as I wanted to for decorations, but you know how that goes.

Here are my hot air balloon centerpieces:

And the cupcakes in their cute little printed wrappers:

And the silverware in mason jars:

Lily

Amelia

And the birthday girls loooooved the cupcakes!

Linking up to Pin for the Wednesdays at Mommin' It Up!

Bow Clutch

I wish I would have picked sewing back up before I had so many kids! I'm having fun with all these Pinterest projects, but I wish I had more time to do all the ones I have pinned!

I pinned this cute little bow clutch from elm street life 9 days ago and I've been obsessed with it ever since. I cut out the pieces last night at our monthly Pinterest party, and sewed it up yesterday in about an hour.

I won't try to lay out the steps, the tutorial is great. Give it a try, even if it looks a little scary! It was actually really easy!

Homemade Laundry Detergent

Bad picture, but it's pretty self-explanatory.

There are a gazillion recipes for homemade laundry detergents on Pinterest, but they are all pretty much the same. Here is the one I used. It was super easy, just dump all the ingredients in a big bucket and mix. I wanted a powdered one because I was so not into boiling gallons of soap and trying to transfer that to other containers. From Sugar Pie Farmhouse (super-cute blog, btw):

1 box of Super Washing Soda $3.09
4 1-lb boxes of Baking Soda 4 x $0.59
1 box of Borax $4.09
3 bars of Kirk's Castile Soap-grated $3.79 for 3 (this was a pain, but didn't take too long)

I just mixed all the ingredients in a large container I already had, and then I threw in some Oxy-clean because I remembered seeing that on another recipe. I just use 2 tablespoons per load, and throw it in on top of the clothes, not in the little drawer where I would normally put liquid laundry detergent.

It has worked great so far, and the total cost was $13.33! I'm thinking this should last me a looooong time, even with 3 little girls and stinky dirty lumber-jack husband.