When I made the homemade sling for Angie I did great on the sling part, but this little piece was going to be the death of me. This piece is what slides up or down on the sling to protect your neck from getting a burn on it.

On the first attempt as you can see, it didn’t turn out so hot. I tried to follow the piece from the sling she gave me so that I could make a pattern. I made my own pattern and added room for seam allowances and to get it over the strap…

Not only was it not big enough. As you can tell from this side of the piece easily that the thing was bigger on one side than it was on the other. Also, I did the fabrics backwards because the hello kitty fabric was supposed to be what was showing on the top, and the way it had been done was showing on the bottom. Lets just say, I have had better days of sewing.

So what did I do? I scrapped the first one where I had tried to copy the pattern and made my own pattern. no curves on the edges, but really… it wasn’t necessary anyways. So this is the final product. Turned out much better than expected.

To see the full sling for the pattern I made from scratch go here and you will see the whole thing. It really did turn out good and Angie LOVED it!

TTFN~

Feel free to stop by my site It’s Sew Stinkin Cute!

Okay, so I call this a craft fail because it isn’t really baking as much as it is decorating. It was a horrible attempt too… So here goes…

My daughters birthday party is going to be on March 27th (yes I am planning early) and the theme is going to be Mickey Mouse Clubhouse. So, after searching the internet far and wide for cute pictures I found these and decided that they would be a must have for the party. Since my MIL works at a candy store I figured she could be of great guidance, but wanted to try them on my own.

Now, lets just say I am REALLY glad I am starting early, because mine turned out terrible, I didn’t even get to the cute red sprinkles and jelly bean part (you will see why). Let me just list out the things that went wrong so that you can get an idea of what it looked like.

1. The caramel kept pooling at the bottom of the apple like a big huge blob. It isn’t like I didn’t stand there and let it drip off, it just kept going like it was running a marathon.
2. For the ears we started by cutting the marshmallows in 1/2 but decided that was too small and had to increase the size after a couple apples looking kind of funny. 
3. We put the ears on after the caramel was dipped and they kept sagging down. We started to call them ear muffs; however, one of my friends saw my craft fail yesterday and so eloquently called one of them a butt muff.
4. We did get the ears to stay up if we waited a couple minutes for the caramel to set before putting on the ears; however, when I dipped it in the chocolate this ones ears just fell flat. (I didn’t seem to get a picture of this one, but trust me it wasn’t a pretty picture)
5. After all this we decided to sans caramel and just put the ears right on the apple and dip it in the chocolate. Now this wouldn’t be so bad if (A) I had gotten a different chocolate, and (B) if I had been patient in the thinning out process. The first apple came out looking like Mickey was multi colored chocolate because the shortening wasn’t completely melted. (You can see this in the first picture below – the apple to the far left – it doesn’t look so bad small, but big it looks really bad!)
6. Not only did the shortening not melt the first time, when it did melt it made the chocolate react kind of funny (you will see in the picture… it wasn’t smooth, it kind of looked like ice was breaking away)

So with all this said, it was really pointless to continue and waste the expensive chocolate I bought, and I decided to just wait until I could change types of chocolate to the normal almond bark you can buy at the store for pretty cheep. As a side note, incase any bakers out there are thinking… maybe she didn’t use a double boiler, sadly I did… and it still turned out like this. Oh well, like the title says… Take 1! I will hopefully be attempting Take 2 this weekend and look forward to mastering making Mickey apples. But until then here are pictures from the Mickey Apple Attempt – Take 1.

See in the back ground in row 2 where the ear has sagged down to the rear?

Closer up to see the pooling and sagging of the ears.

Believe it or not this was the best one. But it was the sans caramel. So the ears are good, they didn’t move; however, the chocolate has that ice breaking effect that just isn’t right.

To keep up with me and see if I have mastered or failed again, hop on over to my and take a look at my blog. Hope everyone enjoyed my major craft fail and look forward to sharing more as I screw up try to master other things (be on the look out for clothing fails as I am a beginning sewing student for clothing from scratch).

TTFN~

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