Valentines

Around here, we've been making valentines until our eyeballs fall out of their sockets. Even though most of the hard work was post-thumbprint, I still had to get a baby thumb to cooperate 54 times to complete all his valentines:

So silly! And a little time-consuming. Mine were much easier:

All it took was some swift white crayon action and some just-as-quick watercolor added. The longest part about making my valentines was setting them out to dry.

Do you give out valentines? What did you do this year?

Painted Paper Snowflakes How-To

We tried a new family craft together as a celebration of winter. Making paper snowflakes is something my mama taught me when I was little, and we used to add glitter details to make them shimmer. Making paper snowflakes is now something we do as a family but with a couple of watercolor aficionados in the house, we added paint. Here's how to do this easy craft with your kids:

Paint white paper with blue and teal and purple watercolors (you know, all those great icy colors!) in whatever patterns you want:

Once it's dry, fold and cut up snowflakes as per usual:

We like to hang ours from the ceiling or tape them to the windows. Do you like to make paper snowflakes too? What do you do with yours?

Mission Remembrance Book

My younger brother just got home from serving a 2-year mission for our church, which is a life-changing experience. It's so difficult to articulate the kind of changes and growth a person encounters during such an experience. Explaining the hows and whys and depth of these personal changes is tricky, so sometimes it's just easier to show it:

I collected all the photos and writings from my brother over the 2-year period he was gone and ended up filling 3 pocket books with weekly updates on his growth. It was fun to go through it again before handing it over to him and notice how much a person can change in only two years.

Personally, when it comes to remembering my growth, I'd rather focus on the future growth ahead of me instead of looking back at what I used to be. (It's just usually embarrassing for me!) I can appreciate the changes I make in myself, though.

How do you document your growth? Do you have physical reminders of how far you've come?

A Nice Pink Party Hat

While having a serious discussion with a favorite three-year-old about birthdays, I mentioned that her sitter had a birthday coming up soon.

I asked her, "What do you think we should make to give her on her birthday?"
Without hesitation, she exclaimed, "Oh! I know! How about a party hat?!"
"That's a great idea!" I told her. "Let's go home and make one for her."
"Sounds great!" She said, "A nice, pink party hat. That's a great idea!"

So, go home we did, and a nice, pink party hat we made:

It was a pretty decent collaboration, and the pink turned out very nice indeed. It was well-received by our sitter with a heart of gold, and is proudly displayed on her mantel still. (Too sweet!) I love that the simplest things are often the most exciting and special to our daughter. It's charming and refreshing to have access to that perspective.

Kid Art- Monster Valentines

Because of the impending holiday, we spent an afternoon as a family constructing valentines for our daughter's classmates:

As with most of our mama-daughter art projects, this was a collaboration. I folded the card bases and wrote the inside phrase. She glued on the eyeballs, which she has a strange affinity for ("No, mom. We need three eyes on each valemtime, not two."), and left her John Hancock on the insides. Then she went through them all again and embellished her signatures just in case.

Each was laboriously glued and scribbled with love and attention to detail. They were personally assigned to individuals after much deliberation. P-dubs wanted to make sure that we included candy with each one mostly because that meant she had to taste test a few to make sure it passed her standards. Success!

Then, as if it weren't enough, we thought it would be funny to hold a huge extended family valentine exchange. So, we prolonged the art date beyond its natural limits and made a second set of valentines. Yet, we all survived, so it turned out to be worth it:

I recycled the idea but used a different set of scrap papers and silly monster embellishments instead of googly eyes. Pepper carefully placed the monster stickers on the card fronts, colored the heart in the sentiment, and wrote novels in every card. It was exhausting work for a tiny person, but she managed to power through and is so proud of her labors of love!

If you need a last-minute valentines idea and happen to have googly eyes laying around, the first set of cards could be a quick option (that is, if your child doesn't need to write a literary review on each card). Or, if you need a more grown-up version, you can see what I did here, for Feather & Fir.

Do you pass out valentines? If so, what were they this year?

String Monogram Part II

Is it just me, or is the problem with doing something for one person in your family is that it makes you feel like you have to do it for everyone else? And let me tell you, my family is big (and just getting bigger) So that generally means a lot of work. However, this is a project I did for just one nephew, and making another one for his big brother wasn't a big deal:

Matching set! Ha! (No guarantees on making one for future kids, though, sis. You're totally on your own for those.) 

Lest you think I'm being cruel for withholding my talents, fret not. She'll be fine because this project is a pretty easy concept and simple to execute, too. This is totally doable.

Just trace the outline of the shape you want on paper, cut it out, and use it as a template for placing your nails. Then tightly weave thread or string around the nails until the area is filled in.

Have you tried this yet? I'd love to see!

Oh, Girlies!

Kirk's mom gave all the girls in the family a little charm bracelet kit to throw together and personalize. Pepper's is more like a necklace because she is so bitty, but she likes putting it on and taking it off again and again. I've been meaning to share these for a while now, so, in the words of my favorite 2-year-old, "Ta-BUM!" (ta-dum!)

Because these came from a kit, all we had to do was pick where we wanted to put the charms. Easy-peasy! These are so sweet and feminine, and Pepper loves that we have matching jewelry with all the other girls in our family...and Kirk was glad he could make his own with the leftover pieces- haha! Love him!

Cloud Nine

I made some cards from CTMH's Cloud Nine card kit:

Fun and bright, right? And they come together so quickly, too! If you want to grab your own set to beef up your card stash, you have until the end of the day (Friday, Jan 31!) to check it out.

I love that these cards will work for gals and guys alike and I think the sentiments are super usable. Plus, the embellishments are dang awesome too. Gold is closing in on my top favorite colors!

Do you keep a card stash? What card sentiments do you find yourself using the most?

New Wreath(s)

It was time to give my droopy little wreath a break. I've been thinking about it for a couple years but needed to stick to my budget. I was going to wait for Christmas things to go on sale after the holiday and make a great new wreath to use for the next year, but found a great deal on shimmery accents the week before, so I was able to festivize my door a week before Christmas. Perfect timing!

 

My favorite part is the focal of the wreath, the larger-than life pine cones. I snagged these huge beauties from my parent's yard and baked the bugs out. Then I coated the outsides with fabulous glitter glue and snuggled them in the wreath with lots of other delicious sparkles.

So, getting one step closer to a classy Christmas led from one thing to another, and well...

Yes, you counted right, I made five wreaths. There's no denying the fact. I found happy places for them all over our house and am excited to rotate them to the prominence of the front door depending on my Christmas mood. This Christmas creativity has been a-brewing for quite a while now, so it's no surprise it came out in a huge and glorious explosion of glitter.

Ka-boom!

Christmas Cards

It seems that no matter how much I plan and prepare, we always seem to run a little short on our Christmas cards. Curses! Luckily, I had some card kits laying around and whipped up  the missing balance pretty quickly. Here's a little peek of what they looked like:

 

I know it's not the traditional holiday photo (it's from our awesome trip to the Grand Canyon in the fall) but the candidness is my favorite and I can't help but love Pepper's ridiculous cheeser.

Still. I swear on all that is holy that I will only make one kind of Christmas card next year. Ain't nobody got time for that!

Christmas Decor

I know Christmas 2013 has now joined the multitudes of Christmases Past, but I have so many things to share with you before looking forward with bright eyes to the next holiday season.

I love decorating for Christmas! Crazy as it sounds, the minute Halloween is over, we pull out the Christmas goodness. There's just something about filling our house with beautiful smells and sparkles that makes the season even more cozy. Love it! This year I pulled out and fixed up these ornamental spheres I made a few years ago for a touch of Christmas color.

 

This first one was made with a styrofoam ball as the base. I simply covered the surface with red rhinestones. I did this in waves, laying down a thin layer of liquid glue in a small area, attaching the rhinestones, then letting that area dry before moving on to the next spot. Once the whole sphere was covered with rhinestones, I covered all the gems with another layer of liquid glue (also in waves) to seal them in. I finished it off by tying it with lace ribbon and a tag.

This next one was the most time-consuming, but I love the way it turned out. I cut out multitudes--yea, even legions--of paper circles, cut them in half, then glued each semi-circle into a cone of wonder. Then, I glued the cones together to create this sphere made entirely of bright stained glass paper, and attached a tag with some brown twine. Honestly, I was surprised that this ended up making such a nicely shaped sphere, but as long as the tips of the cones are lined up, a sphere it shall be. Also, I sponged the edges of all my papers before rolling them up and gluing them together, but I don't recommend it if you can help it. This takes up a lot of paper, y'all, so this is a good project to use for those bulk packs of patterned paper.

And last the best of all the game. This also uses a styrofoam ball as a base, but is covered with green buttons in all tints, thicknesses, and sizes. Same as the red rhinestone ball, I applied the buttons in waves. Once buttons covered the surface, I simply stuck some antiqued copper brads in anywhere I saw the white foam showing through. Then I gave the whole thing a hearty coat of liquid glue in waves to seal everything in.

Oh, shiny Christmas, thank you for making my heart so happy! Stay tuned for more holiday happiness coming at you this week.

Employee Crafting

As I've mentioned before, the company I work for hosts quarterly make-and-takes to keep the employees familiar with the products we carry...plus it's dang fun, and we rarely need an excuse to get together for some delightful times:

I have a tendency to disregard the instructions and do my own thing, so I changed up a few pieces from the original art. I also made sure all my cards were thank-you cards because we use those pretty regularly.

Huzzah for adding to the card stash!

Traditions

We've been playing around with lots of family traditions this year, which has been lots of fun now that Peppity-Pepper is old enough to appreciate fun new things we try out. I've had a papercrafted advent calendar waiting in the wings for this year and knew I wanted to mix up the contents:

The boxes include candy (always a hit!), fruit snacks (losing its appeal lately despite the track record of being an all-time favorite), ornaments (not cool, apparently, although its becoming a more acceptable offering with time), and some pieces of paper that say 'book':

Surprisingly, the books by far get the best reaction! When Pepper opens a box with a piece of paper in it, she carefully opens it, spells out the word, then runs to the Christmas tree. We've wrapped a bunch of our holiday books in wrapping paper and she will carefully select a present, open it and we'll read it together.

It's been a fun way to keep things exciting around here day-to-day, and Pepper talks about opening boxes a lot, which is a good thing. What kinds of things have you done in your families as kids or with your own kids to keep Christmastime happy and exciting?

Party Plate!

Pinterest is the best, don't you think? For one of our weeknight activities with our favorite young ladies, we decorated plates, thanks to some awesome ideas we were Pinspired by:

They were super easy! We just used oil-based sharpies on microwaveable dollar-store plates and got going on our designs. (If you make an oopsie, you can totally clean up your design with rubbing alcohol on a q-tip.) Once we were done, we put the pieces in a cold oven and turned it to 350. Once it got up to temperature, the pieces were baked for 30-ish minutes. Then, the oven was turned off and the pieces stayed in until the oven cooled off. Voila!

I'm digging triangles so much right now, and had them on my mind already when I got the metallic gold marker in my hand. It looks like a party on a plate! I love it so much that I think I'll make my own set of dishes with this pattern.

Gold always makes me think of a party!