My Baby turned 4!!!

We had a birthday here last weekend. I've gotta tell you: It was pretty AWESOME :)

First, of course, were the extra fancy, super dancy invitations :) I found these beautiful Retro style Paper Dolls of Disney Princesses by Cory (on Facebook!)  and made them into these cute Party Invitations - each 4yr old guest got to have her own unique Paper Doll Invite to cut out and bring!

The Goody Bags were the clothes for the dolls :)

Admittedly, knowing that I'm going to be taking a zillion photos and preserving the memories of this birthday party spurred me into doing the prettiest job for my daughter that I could!

Gabby helped me as much as I would let her, but a lot of it, I wanted to have as a surprise. 

Here is the delighted Birthday Girl seeing all of the finished projects:

Of course, we had to have a Doll Cake. I made this. Gabby LOVED this. I was so pleased :)

And we decorated Doll Cookies with Frosting and pretty Sprinkles

And here is the Doll House!

I'm super proud of this :) I found these 2 matching bookshelves Free for Pickup on Kijiji. I decided on Bookshelves, because I wanted a dollhouse that would be tall enough for a BARBIE to live in comfortably. Because Barbies are super replaceable, so I'll never have to worry about finding a unique size of doll.

 I turned them on their sides, not lined up, so that the "rooms" wouldn't look so oddly uniform.

 I drilled a hole through both shelves and screwed them together to avoid tipping hazards.

 And sanded and painted the whole thing white. Gabby loved helping me with the first coat of white paint :)

 First coat finished... it made me a little bit nervous how shabby it still looked...

 but then I did 2 more coats, and I was pretty pleased with myself :)

... I didn't take pictures of this part, but I used some of my old scrapbooking paper that I still had around and glued it to the walls. I tried Mod Podge, but I found that a plain old Glue Stick worked loads better!

After the paper was on the walls, I got some lacquer from the paint section at Walmart and lacquered the whole thing so that it can be wiped clean if (when!) necessary.

After the lacquer dried, I glued (yes, with glue gun. hot glue gun was too lumpy) some pretty Grosgrain ribbon over the paper seams to make a pretty "Chair Rail" :)

Alright. There are a few things that I'm super super proud of. This is one of them.

I saved the plastic inserts from my Finish Dishwasher Tabs. It's a silly packaging thing, but the plastic sheets have rectangular "frames" to keep the tabs from moving around inside the box. Those plastic sheets were PERFECT for miniature French Windows! I filled the indents with white paint (a smarter me would have used tape to keep the paint where I wanted it. The Real Me just used nail polish remover and a Q-tip to clean the paint off of where I didn't want it) and then printed off some pretty flower scenes to glue behind it. Again with the Glue stick (I went through about 6 for this whole project) Then I glued some more grosgrain ribbon around the edges to make a window sill.

Once my windows were up, I cut up a white voile curtain panel that I grabbed for $6 at Walmart and made my own no-sew curtains. The valance at the top is just a strip of cardboard covered in fabric. I used a glue gun on this part. Then I glue-gunned some satin ribbon knotted at the bottom corner of each window to use as a Tie-Back. Again, proud moment :)

The whole house is a work in progress - I want to make furniture, etc with my girls. But I decided I didn't want to be bothered trying to figure out how to make an oven/cabinets/toilet/tub, and just picked up the Barbie version of these things.

The bathroom didn't come with a sink, just the vanity mirror. I was playing around with it, and the clear plastic cases from iPods might make a cute sink :) With a few butterfly screws for faucets. So fun thinking in miniature!

And this is another one of my favorites: A $1 Frame becomes a Large Flatscreen TV :) I took a screen shot of my girls' favorite music video (Selena Gomez: Love you Like a Love Song) and printed it off and stuck it in the frame. They love it!

I'm excited to do so much more :) My girls are super excited too! And I'm REALLY excited to put all of these pictures into my 2012 Family Yearbook that I've been making at www.PrintedJewels.com :)