May Day Basket Exchange

I was super excited to participate in angelina la dawn tomato's May Day Basket Exchange!  The rules were simple:

...since may day is all about the end of winter, this exchange is going to be all about spring and warmer weather! have fun with it and get creative with your 'basket' of goodies: music, reading material, crafty goodies, prints or postcards- whatever makes you thing of spring! but to ensure it's a fair exchange, just make sure your package is worth at least $10-15...

Knowing all this, it doesn't take a genius to figure out the basket I used to send goodies to my swap partner in, now does it?  Remember my May Day Basket tutorial I guest posted over at The Creative Place?  (It got featured over the weekend on both HGTV's Design Blog and My DIY Wedding Day, a Wedding Channel blog - wheeee!)  That's the basket I made for my swap partner!

I filled the basket with goodies... all wrapped deliciously in small packages of white tissue paper tied with light pink ribbons...

And what was hidden inside those petite packages you ask?

Bubble bath and sunflowers and lip gloss and a pretty tin of mints, local chocolates, a butterfly eraser, nail file and toe separators, and a set of hand stamped notecards...

Happy Spring, indeed!

April Cupkins - Spring Swirl Cupcakes

It's the first Monday of the month!  Welcome to the April edition of CUPKINS, a collaboration between Meg at Mega•Crafty and I.  Each month, Meg shares a muffin recipe and I share a cupcake recipe with the same theme.  This month's theme is SPRING!

Spring Swirl Cupcakes
These are more of a technique than a recipe - I'm swamped this month!  These swirled cupcakes are as much fun to make as they are to eat though - and kids are amazed by them!  

How to:   

Using a vanilla cupcakes recipe, make cupcake batter then divide the batter into two seperate bowls.  Add food coloring of your choice to each bowl.  I used pink and yellow.  When filling your cupcake liners, add one color first, then the other, using a spoon or small measuring cup.  Continue to alternate
colors until your liners are 2/3 full.
 

Bake per cupcake recipe directions and allow to fully cool.  Look how pretty they are inside!

To Decorate:

Keep it simple.  Swirl on some frosting using a ziploc bag instead of a piping bag.  Cut the tip off a corner of the bag to use to pipe.  I used plain white frosting for this part.

With smaller ziploc bags of each pink and yellow frosting, cut a very small tip off one corner of the bags - as small as you can.  Pipe pink circles to make the flower petals, and yellow circles to make the center of the flowers.

These would be perfect for Mother's Day, too!  The swirl technique can be used in many color combination's for different holidays and events.  Check out examples here and here.

Now hop on over to Meg's place to see her Daffodil Lemon Muffins... they are absolutely AMAZING!

May Day Basket

I don't know about you, but I'm 100% ready for Springtime.  The daffodils and tulips are blooming where I am, showing promise of warmer weather to come!  Today I'm sharing with you my tutorial to create a lovely little May Day basket to fill with treasures and pretties in celebration of Spring.

Here's what you'll need:

- One 12x12 sheet of scrapbook paper

- One 81/2x11 sheet of contrasting colored cardstock

- Monoadhesive

- Embellishments

And here's how to make it:

Happy Spring to you all!