Day 38: My Fingers are Bound

My lips/fingers/and pictures are sealed.  We did in fact do a craft today, but with Valentine's Day looming in under a week, I am bound by the code of secrecy to not divulge what we have been up to today in fear that someone, sitting across the room from me, may find out what the girls and I are planning for Valentine's Day.

I will say this:  We did NOT finish Valentine's Day cards like I had hopped, but I am really happy with what we have in the works.  I guess there will be days that I can't really say much about crafts because they are going to be surprises for readers of this blog....

Tomorrow is Pay Day, so time to go stock up on crafting supplies for the rest of Valentine's Week... and Mardi Gras too :)  hehe

Day 37- Valentine's Invites, Part 1

Today began the first multi-day craft project of the year.  Iris needs to make 12 Valentine's for her classmates for next Thursday.  I decided to make it as COMPLICATED on myself as possible, obviously, why wouldn't I?

Last week, Iris picked out glitter card stock, white card stock, and heart printed velum.  We decided to make a large heart out of the glitter, a smaller heart out of the white, and another large heart out of the velum.  Today, we made 4 cards.  Iris colored each card that we made after I wrote "Happy Valentine's Day"

We still have to make the other cards, and Iris wants to make pink/purple/red/white crayons for her classmates, so we will be repeating our first craft in the near future as well.  But, I'll post pictures when they are done.  This could be a multiple part project, especially if i only get 3-4 done a day... oh yeah and ran out of Velum today :-p  Time to get back to Jo-Anns!

Day 36- Crayons

 Who doesn't have as many broken crayons in boxes as they do whole crayons??  I have been saving broken crayons for a long time for a day just like today.  I even had the heart shaped ice cube tray sitting around knowing that I wanted to use it for making crayons... actually, I found it in the bottom of a box in the basement or garage and brought it in and threw it in the dishwasher.  When it came out, it was all bent and Mike goes "I see you lost an ice cube tray."  I looked at him and said "Why?" and he tells me, "it got all bent out of shape in the dishwasher."  I just laughed and told him that I didn't care because it was for crayons anyway haha.  It is a good thing I didn't care about that tray too, because it was coated in crayon when it came out of the oven... but more on that later.

This could be one of the easiest crafts, most interactive, and fun crafts we have done to date.  The kids helped rip the paper off the crayons that had paper left... Iris went through a phase that she did NOT want paper on the crayons when she was much littler.  Then I cut the the crayons into very small pieces.  Once we had all of our pieces cut, we began filling the ice cube tray with crayon pieces... if you decide to do this at home, you can also use silicon cupcake molds, but only fill them about 1/3-1/2 of the way.

After they were filled, we stuck them in a 230* oven for 45 minutes.. if you use cupcakes molds, you will need about an hour... until everything was melted.  Once they come out of the oven, let them cool for an hour or so, pop them out of the molds, and instant crayons!












We really enjoyed coloring with them before dinner time today too.

Day 35- Handprint Hearts

This is a new one, I am currently writing my blog in peace and quiet.  The house is cleaned up for the night, the baby is sleeping, and other than her, I am completely alone.  Mike took Iris and Penny to the library for story time by himeself today because I am just not feeling like it.  We are all (but Mike) fighting some sort of head cold, and I just didn't want to go out tonight in the cold and snow.  So here I sit, 7:25, mostly alone, blogging with the last few minutes alone that I have.

A week or so ago I came up with this handprint heart idea.  I figured, I could have the girls overlap their hand prints in the shape of a heart.  And it involves PAINT! haha.  I am not saying that I am the first person to ever think of this, but I love when I come up with an idea on my own.  I don't feel totally uncreative then :)

Today seemed like a good day to break out the handprint heart, so I grabbed some red paint and construction paper.  As an afterthought, I got the glue and some glitter too to decorate it them a little more, oh and crayons since they love to color.

I simply had them hold their fingers together and press their hands onto the paper.... Then did the other hand, lining their fingers up together, slightly overlapping their thumbs.  When they lifted their hands up, there were perfect hearts!

I love when my ideas turn out just as well, if not better, than I had hopped!

All of my pictures are crooked, but I HATE blogger's picture editing, and I am done with it.... GAH STUPID BLOGGER!!!!!!  Seriously thinking about switching to wordpress...

Day 34- Birthday Cards part 2

So, we had to take a break from Valentine's Day crafts to make birthday cards for Pappy Lewis and PapPap.  My dad turned 56 yesterday, and my uncle's birthday will be on Tuesday, so we had to make sure to make cards for them this week.  I should have made cards earlier, but to be honest, February totally snuck up on me and I didn't even realize it was my dad's birthday until late yesterday evening.  But, i called him and said happy birthday before the end of the evening, so it is OK! haha



We didn't quite go as all out this time with gluing stuff on, but I found these really fun twistable crayons that that were metallic, neon, and multicolored.  The girls had a lot of fun, and then they found some pastelish markers, I didn't even know we had them, and had a lot of fun coloring.  Iris is getting really creative with her  tracing.  She managed to complete go around the sketched S, trace the I and the R, and she gave a valent effort at tracing the heart.  She is also recognizing that I is the first letter of her name, which makes me really happy.

I hope that this makes any sense, because we are watching the Super Bowl as I am typing, and I am not entirely sure that I have made a cohesive thought :)  I will end this with: Happy Birthday Pappy Lewis and PapPap Mack!  We love you both very much, and hope that you have wonderful birthdays.

Day 33- Valentine's Day 2

It used to be easy, look up at the clock and find the date, write that on the header.  Now, I actually have to pay attention to what my previous blog was.
We have had terrible lake effect snow for the last 48 hours.   I was afraid we were going to be totally snowed in today, but we managed to get out and go to Amazone with the girls and some friends.  So that ate up a huge chunk of our craft time.  Thankfully, I had already planned a very easy dinner and a relatively easy craft.

I am realizing that I can't have in depth crafts every day.  Every once in awhile, I need to do something easy and fun.  Today's craft was both easy AND fun.  Stringing beads on to pipe cleaners.  It doesn't seem all that exciting, but the girls really enjoyed it, and my super OCD personality enjoyed being able to make a perfect pattern with the beads!

Iris took right to it, stringing all of her beads onto the pipe cleaner that I had formed into a heart.  Penny wanted nothing to do with the heart shape, so hers turned out to be more like a snake of some sort, but it was colored in a very Valentiney way :)  Honestly, sometimes it is really nice to just sit back and let the kids lead craft.  Today was a seriously low stress day.  And 2 days and 2 Valentine's themed crafts done... only 12 more to go :)

Day 32- Valentine's Day begins!

Well, here we go, February 1st.  Day 32, a craft a day for over a month!  And that means that it is time to start making Valentine's crafts.

I will admit, i failed today.  You live, you learn.  I found BIG yarn needles, thinking that it would be easier for the girls to learn to "sew" with.  But, the eye was so big that it didn't fit through anything I had in the house... not even the shelf liner that someone on Pinterest recommended.  I ended up giving up and wrapping the end of yarn in tape and feeding it through the itty-bitty holes in the heart shaped mesh stuff... i don't even know what it is called.

Penny didn't want to do craft at ALL today, she just wanted to throw herself off chairs and cry.  So, being the wonderful mom I am, let her, haha.  Iris though, enjoyed trying to sew with the yarn.  She loved pulling the yarn through and then handing it back to me to feed through the next hole.  She wants to finish it tomorrow, but this is what it looks like so far...