I Did It!

Almost a triple success, actually 😀

Here are the tasks that won me the game…

Create A New Ice-Cream Sandwich Combination

Last Christmas, on a whim, I came up with a DELICIOUS homemade ice-cream sandwich combination: gingersnaps & vanilla ice cream. I am obsessed and have been making them ever since, even keeping pre-made, individually wrapped sandwiches on hand in the freezer whenever possible. My favorite desserts have always been ice-cream or fruit, but now my favorite dessert has officially changed to homemade ice cream sandwiches. They. Are. Delectable. So naturally I knew I needed to come up with more flavors!

I was really sick almost all of June, so I went with peanut butter cookies and vanilla ice cream because it sounded both delicious and fairly easy to get right without too much tweaking. Walker loved them! I loved them too, but they were a bit too sweet for my taste. Next time I’ll probably make one batch for Walker and then make a much less sweet batch for me 🙂

Paint A Decent Coloring Page Background (Besides Black)

Lately in my coloring books I’ve been on an acrylic black backgrounds kick. I had been sticking with only black, because painting in small details without making an utter mess of things has been impossible for me for years. Black backgrounds, on the other hand, were much more forgivable since I could use a black paint pen to fill in the small details and therefore only had to use a paintbrush for the larger spaces.

But I still wanted to challenge myself to get better with a paintbrush, hence the “besides black” part of this challenge. Without my black paint-pen crutch, I knew I’d have to force myself to really, really try instead of giving up on the paintbrush when the going got tough.

And I did it! (This page was drawn by artist Hannah Lynn and colored by me)

I think I painted 3 acrylic paint backgrounds in the month of June…one yellow (of course) and two in turquoise ^_^

Fill My Scrapbook Calendar Page

For the last three years I’ve been keeping a scrapbook calendar. Basically all that means is that I glue photos or happy receipts or any other special memorabilia from any given month onto said month’s calendar page image. It’s the best, because it’s scrapbooking without the work!

Well, ever since covid happened my calendar pages have pretty much been blank, which is why I really wanted to fill it up for the month of my birthday. It was a MAJOR success and ended up being filled with so much happiness that I really didn’t want to have turn the page to July 💛

Make Dolphin Art

As one of the tasks that had the greatest freedom of interpretation, I decided to cross-stitch a yellow dolphin! I had to make the pattern for the dolphin by hand using a couple sheets of graph-paper index cards, and haha in my ignorance I made a very obvious mistake: I didn’t account for how one square on the index card would scale to one square on the cross stitch fabric! So what looked to be about six or seven inches on paper ended up being…an inch and a half in real life, hence the blurriness of this photo 😝

Go Fruit Picking

I planted 6 strawberry plants last year and this year they started producing lots of fruit! The only problem was that my backyard bugs devoured every single strawberry just as they began to turn pink *sad face*

Over a hundred devoured strawberries into the season, I accepted that I would not be able to enjoy my own homegrown strawberry harvest…and then came the week of my birthday and a bunch of almost-red strawberries were still on the plants! So I had a strawberry picking party (and feast) and they were deeeelicious!

The rest of the week was more of the same until I devoured enough strawberries to hold me over for the rest of the season 💛

Honorable Mentions:

Get Something In The Mail
I actually got two things in the mail! A Birthday card from my sweet Miss Foskett, and a birthday gift of garden butterfly decorations from my sweet Annelise ❤️

Finish 5 Coloring Pages
(I shared one of my favorites last week here)

Get A Different Haircut
The requirement of “different” was: “get a haircut I’ve never gotten before.” I had a specific one in mind, but with hair salons shut down I wasn’t able to get it so instead I CUT MY OWN HAIR! Haha. Something I have NEVER done before, and never thought I would do. But as it had been over six months since my super layered haircut got fixed up, and as it was looking awfully uneven and gross, I chopped off over 6 inches of hair and tried to make what was left look pretty. And it actually turned out really good! It feels sooo healthy and sports natural waves everyday that make me smile.

The Verdict…

By the end of my birthday month I succeeded in accomplishing 14 out of the 25 task boxes! Granted, there were a couple times where much creative liberties were taken in order to do so, but I only did that in situations where the story involved was just too good not to, hehe. I’m a huge fan of both such stories, so I’m pretty sure you will be hearing about them sometime in the future 😉

And for those of you who have a quarantine birthday coming up, why not put together a birthday-month Bingo game of your own? It sure made mine so much more happy, fun, memorable, & special 💛

Yours Truly,
~Cassia Dee