Polar Vortex: Playing Catch-Up

Well, if there is any advantage to living in the Polar Vortex in Minnesota, it's that I have a little time to try and get caught up on 6 months of blog posts. Or at least attempt getting started writing posts. This first post is just a catch-up post of a couple projects to ease my way in. ;-)

First, here's a duct tape notebook my 8 year old made all on her own last summer. She didn't look at anything on Pinterest or online. Just had the picture in her head (my little right-brained learner!) and created this!

Look at that ear detail! It's 3-dimensional!

We had a wonderful nanny last summer and we made these fun little gifts for her as thank you gifts:

She was heading to Virginia Tech for school so we attempted to make her a rainbow loom bracelet in the right colors (really the school color is a little more maroon, but I digress). I just gave the girls some 5 x 7 canvas boards and asked them to make a fun picture, but that I wanted them to use different lines and patterns so here's what they came up with. They used permanent markers to color these.

The bright colors and happy drawings make me think of summer and warmth! :-)

My girls school has an art class once a week after school. Each girl will be artist of the week once during the term. Here are the girls' artist of the week creations for the fall:

These paper sculptures were really cool! I love the 3-dimensional quality of them!

(Sorry the quality of the photos isn't the best, I took them on my iPhone). ;-)

Craft Project: Gifts for Summer Sitter

I had a WONDERFUL high school senior who helped me out over the summer. She nannied for us once or twice a week and it made my summer so much easier! We all LOVED her! Even though we have one more year to have her sit for us before she heads off to college, I wanted the girls to make her something to say thank you for all the hard work she did over the summer.

Ella wanted to make her a foil embossed canvas like the ones we made for our kitchen wall. We kept it smaller and bought 5 x 7 canvas boards. Lily wanted to make her a button mosaic but I asked her if she'd like to use pony beads instead (we have TONS of pony beads and not so many buttons left). ;-) She said beads worked for her!

I started off by having the girls draw their designs with pencil. Then, Lily glued her beads on the paper and painted her canvas board. When they were both dry, we glued them together and here's her super cute ladybug bead mosaic:

While using glue and yarn for the foil-embossed canvas worked all right, I recently saw a blog post that suggested using glue for the embossed design. I had my 9 year old draw her picture and then I used Discount School Supply tacky glue to go over her pencil design. I thought this would raise up better than using Elmer's school glue or Glue-all. I went over my lines twice. We let it dry and then instead of using spray adhesive to adhere the foil, I used a simple glue stick. It worked FABULOUS!!! And much less messy than spray adhesive. I then used a q-tip to push the foil down around the dried glue. WORKED AMAZING! We will be doing all our foil-embossed projects with this technique from now on!

Here's the foil before she colored it:

And after being colored with Sharpie markers:

LOVE how both of these turned out and our sitter was overjoyed to receive them!