Happy Easter!

During a recent crafty getaway with Sarah, I doodled on some easter eggs. One a day in fact. They were like my creative break from being creative. Does that make sense? They were easy, had no plan, and no required outcome. If they turned out nice – hurray! If not, I wasn’t really out any time, frustration or money. But I’m happy with the final result and since we were traveling the week prior to Easter, they were our sole decorations for the holiday.

These were inspired by some I found on pinterest that Alisa Burke had done. Hers are crisp white and black with finer details. Something came over me while I was packing for our trip and I thought of those eggs. So I tossed a few previously blown out eggshells into the oven to bake off any potentially harmful bacteria, stuck them in a container with a sharpie and into my suitcase they went. The question is, who did I think they were going to harm? It’s not like I was filling them with chocolate. I wanted to boil them but I didn’t have time for them to dry before leaving town, so baking had to do. I now think this was probably an unnecessary step. Unfortunately, it browned the shell a bit. Fortunately, the antiquey sheen given to them by the baking grew on me. More so when I placed them in a gun metal glazed Eva Zeisel relish dish.

A Valentine Photo Walk

Gave myself a little valentine present of a photo walk. I felt it was appropriate to start at this welder’s shop.

More shots here.

Valentine Necklaces

Did you wonder what we were making last week? Well, here they are – valentine necklaces!

I literally got requests from parents at Eleanor’s preschool to make beanbags again like last year, but chose to politely ignore them. They were a little more work than I was up for this year as I’m on jury duty and had no idea how much time I’d actually have.

Inspired by these gift tags over at burlap + blue, we made necklaces out of crayola model magic clay. They clay is fun and easy  to work with and created light as air pendants. The only down side is that they can pretty easily be broken in half if one should try.

Best idea for preschoolers? Probably not.  Certainly not as useful as the beanbags. However, they’re delicate and sweet and Eleanor is very happy with them. Plus it gave me an excuse to buy a lovely little sampler pack from The Twinery.

 

I’m also happy to announce that we finally used up all this pink card stock. This is literally the 3rd year that it has been used for making valentines.

Not only did she happily carry her bag of valentines to school this morning, but we got her all gussied up with her felt button covers, one of these necklaces AND my 1st ever attempt at ribbon braids in her hair. Not just any ribbon braids either, ribbon braids in a heart shape. I really need to stop looking at Girly Do’s By Jenn as I think I might be getting carried away. Little girl hair styling on a willing participant is a bit addictive.

A Bubbly Valentine

Unlike his birthday themes that he picks out 2 years in advance, Seth was super indecisive about his valentines this year. He really wanted to give out little tubes of bubbles, but he kept changing his mind on how exactly these bubbles were going to be presented. Two days before Valentine’s Day and he’s describing to me his Plan A, Plan B, Plan C… When he got to Plan D I cut him off. He really wanted to do something similar to last year. But we made one up and it just wasn’t working due to the thickness of the tubes. The rest of his plans were similarly complex with unresolved issues and we were getting down to the wire. So I started to do a little brainstorming and came up with this tag. It actually contains elements from many of his ideas – photo of him, bubbles, a tag. The only plan it didn’t accommodate was one involving little rockets with the bubbles tucked inside. I’m not THAT crazy. Well… maybe I am, but we didn’t have enough time for crazy.

I took a photo already out on flickr, popped it into Speechable to add the silly little speech bubble, used the handy tools for sizing and printing already on iphoto and boom I had a pic ready to make into tags. Super speedy I tell ya. Using my great new circle punch (that had some how found it’s way into my christmas stocking not too long ago), Seth was able to punch them all out himself. It really helped that the punch is flat on both sides and fairly wide, so even though he’s only 7 he had enough strength to work this large punch upside down. He added his signature to the backside, including circles representing hugs but left off the ‘x’s so as not to give any wrong ideas.

Valentine Making in Progress!

Now the hard part. Waiting 2 days for them to dry. Tick. Tock. Tick. Tock.

Felt Heart Button Covers in Action!

Of course the very day after Eleanor insisted that she could not possibly wear the button covers with anything other than her purple stripped tights, I found her rummaging through her drawers looking for her “heart buttons”! Apparently it finally sunk in that I don’t do the wash daily and she had settled on a different pair of tights. And here I was thinking I had found the solution by putting the shirt aside to wait for the tights to be cleaned. Nope. Once we put all the clothes back in her drawers, dressing commenced and I ended up with a very happy girl.

I did find out that it doesn’t pay to ignore the directions on which way to place the button slit and that said slits should be made on the small side. As I mentioned yesterday, it took me less than 5 minutes to make the 7 little hearts. Well, it took me even less than that to redo the 3 front hearts so that they wouldn’t pop off every time her little belly rubbed against something. Now they’re on there snugly and all is going well. Personally, it’s the french cuffs on a 4 yr old that slays me.

PS Look where my paper doll snowflakes ended up! A dreamy little slide show about snow. Oh, how I wish it would snow!

Felt Heart Button Covers

I’ve always wanted to make these little felt button covers since I very 1st saw them in a Martha Stewart Kids years ago when the magazine still existed. But since we live off hand-me-downs, this is the 1st year I’ve actually had a button down shirt for Eleanor that would work. I think it looks better on a wider placket such as that in the original inspiration, but this works just fine too. Once I had the felt, the project took less than 5 minutes. I was shocked that I had such a cute little embellishment in such a short amount of time. It helped that I let go of the idea of perfectly measured hearts and just eyeballed it.

Eleanor thinks they’re grand too, but insists on wearing them with a certain pair of purple striped hand-me-down tights that she wore the day before I made these and I’ve yet to wash. Maybe that’s what I should go do now!

A Valentine pARTy

Had a little fun at Jen’s this weekend making lovey dovey stuff. A paint chip garland inspired by this and a smattering of cards. You know who the green one is for, don’t you?

Henna Heart

A little henna tattoo on the 4 year old. She loves it and is very sad that it’s starting to fade.

Melting Heart