christmas ornaments 2014

When our kids are grown up it's my hope that we'll have some kind of child-made ornament on our tree from each year they were little.  Until they're in school and they (hopefully) have teachers who will help me with this, I'm on my own.  Miles has this ornament from his first year.  It doubled as the favor from his Baptism.  We made this one (one of my favorites) last year.  I found lots of fun ideas on Pinterest this year but we ended up doing our own thing...

I used Model Magic this year, basically because I have a newborn and I'm not about to mix salt dough. I have to include the disclaimer that I have never used Model Magic for anything that I wanted to last for a long period of time.  I have no idea how this ornament will hold up long term but I did coat it so hopefully it works out.  This ornament is Model Magic rolled into a ball, flattened, and cut into an oval. M then pushed his hand into it to make a hand indentation.  Then I did the same with G's hand over M's.  As I've mentioned here and here and probably various other places, baby handprints are the bane of my crafting existence.  Her hands were not painted.  They made the indentations then I painted over them on the ornament.  No handprints involved in the making of this ornament:

As you can see we also attempted a footprint, that I haven't decided what to do with yet, and M made a red moon in the process.  I also ended up writing "2013" at the bottom of M's hand in gold.  

I also did a ball ornament for G similar to M's from his first year that is linked above.  Quick and easy footprint on a ball with her name and the year written on the other side.  Tip- roll the baby's foot not the ball.  I love that we have two of these now:

Pinterest and Facebook have made late night feedings more fun and I did end up pinning a number of other ornament ideas you might want to check out.  You can find most of them on this board. 

sibling handprints

A few weeks ago, while we were waiting for Baby G to arrive, we started this project. I mentioned it in this post.  Two weeks ago G joined us and since then we've finished it. 

I've said before that newborn handprints are pretty elusive. Back when M was a newborn I changed this idea from hands to feet because (at least my) newborns aren't especially cooperative when it comes to painting hands.  We had to get a handprint for this one though because a hand and a foot would have looked a little funny. Therefore, you'll notice G's handprints are a little smudgy. We got the best we could. 

Here they are; small canvases from any craft store, I think they were BOGO when I bought them at Michael's.  A handprint from M and a handprint from G.  They now each have one hanging in their bedrooms.  G's first art project....

october art

Last week I realized that last October our kitchen was full of fun fall art and this October all we had hanging up was a half-finished water colored coloring book page of Ernie trick-or-treating.  I suppose I could blame that on our countdown to baby G and the fact that baby prep has come before toddler art but that excuse makes me sad so over the long weekend we did a few projects to make our house a little more seasonal looking.

We did my most favorite Halloween project last year but this year's were cute too.  A few months ago we needed cotton balls for one of our many dog ailments of the year.  I don't think M had ever really seen them and he took to playing with them and calling them "bunnies."  I knew he'd like this project because it included cotton balls and ghosts, a new favorite since a neighbor hung a big ghost in the tree outside their house.  We used about 10 cotton balls (spread apart) and black construction paper cut into a ghost shape.  

I spread glue over the ghost first but if M were older I would have had him handle the glue.  He had to take the cotton and stick it on.  Being the efficient two-year old he is, he took all the cotton at once and dumped it on the ghost so we then had to work on spreading out the pieces.  

We also did a paper plate pumpkin that M enjoyed painting.  He loved using the big foam brush.  We've been playing with pumpkin faces lately so once he finished painting and the paint was still wet I let him stick on the face pieces by himself and then I glued them as he had left them.  He did a pretty good job and I love the crooked-ness of it.  

We also started a special project over the weekend that I've been looking forward to.  We can't finish without baby G so this is a "to be continued" part of the post for a few weeks from now.  About a month ago I bought two small canvases especially for this project.  While we had the paint and smocks out for our pumpkin I figured we should get M's piece done because I clearly remember how hard it is to get a newborn handprint on anything.  

On each canvas will be an M handprint and a G handprint.  One will hang in his room and one will hang in her room.  To be continued....