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?

One Million Cookies

Guys. We've been making cookies for the past two months straight for a family wedding. All good things, all good things, but I will not be making any cookies for the 2016 calendar year. Firstly, I'm all sugared out until the end of time, and secondly, the leftovers (of which there are many) are still sitting in our freezers.

I say 'our freezers' because I was not alone in this quest. My sweet little Pepper was more than happy to help out. And, my mom and sisters have also been baking their brains out. It may have been many late nights, but the results were unarguably worth it.

I made tags for all the cookies (because heaven knows the worst thing when you're expecting chocolate chips is to discover raisins instead!) using the Mini Minc from Heidi Swapp. I printed the tags off on my toner printer and ran them through the machine with lovely gold foil. Lickety-split!

All in all, we made 17 different kinds of cookies, quadrupled or octupled every recipe, and I personally filled at least a dozen gallon freezer bags with baked goods. I wish I had counted exactly how many cookies we made, because we would have impressed ourselves, I think. However, I think that approximately one million is a safe guess!

Quick Thank-yous

Here's an idea for a quick and small thank-you card:

In two hours' time, make a thousand million 3" x 2" card bases, apply a watercolor wash to each base, and stamp the sentiment over the dry paint. (You can use any sentiment you like, but considering the season and all the things we have to be grateful for these days, I turned these into thank-you cards.)

I made a ton in every color of the rainbow and have already gone through most of them. They're easy to add to a plate of cookies or to tuck under a pillow or leave on someone's keyboard. I make sure to always have a substantial stash of thank-you cards on hand so that I can respond courteously and in a timely fashion.

Unless a gift comes from a very close friend or is super meaningful, I find it difficult to fill up an entire thank-you card. And call me crazy, but with larger card sizes I feel obligated to fill up all the space. Enter smaller card sizes. They can be just as genuine and kind but without all the extra fluff I find myself adding to larger cards.

Waddaya say? You wanna try these? Or do you have another thing that works well for you?

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?

Piles and Piles

Around here, we've been arting our buns off like crazy kooks! It seems like that spindly-legged kid of ours has caught our project passion and creating habit, which is good and bad. Good because making things is awesome! Bad because...what a mess! Her project piles gather on our couches, counters, piano benches, desks, fireplace, and floors, especially in high-traffic walkways:

We can't blame her for all the messes, though, because she most likely picked up on the busy project-making buzz surrounding our grownup shenanigans. We've been leaving our own piles of our creations everywhere, too.

While we do enjoy simple and somewhat tidy spaces, we also strive to foster creativity and imagination around these parts.  For us, that usually involves experimentation and not being attached to materials used to carry out our wild schemes. Also, it gives us a lot to think about when it comes to tradeoffs and sacrificing a clean home for the greater good.

What are some ways you embrace imagination and other good things that are messy?

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?

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?

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?

Winner!

Thanks for playing along, everyone! The winner of the card giveaway is:

Congratulations, Elaine! Let me know what color you'd like and I'll be sure to get it to you.

Here's to a lovely weekend, everyone. I hope your holiday preparations are peaceful or productive...whichever one you need the most.

Card Swap and Giveaway

Earlier this month, I got together with some of my favorite artists in the world for a good ole'-fashioned card swap. We each made a card then brought enough supplies for everyone else to make that card too, and I couldn't be happier with the results:

So, one of the best things about being in a card swap with professional scrapbooking artists (I kid you not, it's a real thing!) is that you're guaranteed to come away with gorgeous artwork sporting all the newest embellishments. Nicely played, ladies!

The question for you now, is: can you guess which card out of the bunch I designed?

If you said the "hip-hip-hooray" one, you're right! The design was so simple, that I wanted to make it available in multiple colors, and they all look great, although the teal is my favorite. (Don't cry, purple, one day you will also get a turn being my favorite color.) Meanwhile, check out what they look like in different colors:

It would tickle me pink to spread the card love! Leave a comment by midnight, December 10th, for your chance to win a hip-hip-hooray card of your own, in one of the three colors pictured above.

Hooray! And good luck!