Month: November 2012

This is actually from last year, but it seemed more timely to post it at the beginning of December so you had time to plan rather than randomly posting it in January February so I saved the post.  That’s right, I’ve had this post scheduled since last February!   You’ll forgive me if I don’t go back and try to edit the picture, right?  Let’s just pretend that I corrected the white balance, m’kay?  lol.

Last year I stumbled upon this via Pinterest and decided that I *had* to make it Christmas morning.  Or rather, that Michael should make it Christmas morning.  I think we can all agree that he is the far superior cook.  🙂

I made a few changes, namely 1 pancake instead of 2, and I used blueberries for the eyes instead of whipped cream and chocolate chips.  Y’all, I’m way too neurotic to give Kate whipped cream and chocolate chips for breakfast!  We also did a raspberry nose instead of a strawberry nose.

I think they turned out super cute!  Michael did get a wee bit grumpy that his pancake got cold while I was taking the picture.  What can I say?  I don’t eat bacon so I couldn’t use mine!  Kate was kind of ambivalent about the pancakes.  I think she was way more excited about all of the toys Santa left her.  🙂

Let the Christmas crafts begin!

I had so much fun making these!

It was a pretty simple supply list.  I bought some cardboard letters at Joannes to use as the base.  I had planned on using wooden ones, but I didn’t like any of the fonts so cardboard it is.  🙂  I also used 1 piece of scrapbook paper (last year’s My Mind’s Eye), some paint, mod podge, scissors and a paint brush.

First I painted the front and sides of the letters red.  I gave them 2 coats with plenty of dry time in between.  Oh, and about halfway through the first coat, I remembered that thinner paint is your friend so I added a bit of water and shook it up.  I’d go ahead and do this first if I was you.  🙂

The next day, I played around with how to lay out the letters so I could get away with using only one piece of paper.  (I’m cheap like that.)  If you’re spelling joy it works like this.  🙂  Of course this only works if your paper doesn’t have a directionality.

I just traced around the letters with a pencil.  (Should I add that to the supply list?)  When I cut them out, I cut inside of the lines because I wanted a wee bit of a red border on the top (maybe a mm or 2.)

As you can see from the curly cues, that’s easier said that done.  lol.  I erred on the side of too big and then went back several times removing just a hair more paper.  It’s way easier to cut off a bit more than to cut out a whole new set because it’s too small.

Here you can see the bit of border.  I think it gives it a bit of definition.

   

To attach the paper, first I painted a coat of mod podge onto the front of the letter.  Paint quickly because it dries fast!

Then carefully set the paper on the letter and smooth out any bubbles.

I always end up with a bit of glue oozing out the sides because, according to my kindergarten teacher, I am a glue glober.  It’s cool.  We’ll deal with it in the next step.

Paint mod podge over the top of the letter to seal it paying special attention to the edges.

Then carefully paint the sides.  You could probably skip painting the sides, but I like the gloss that it adds.  Also, I would find it really frustrating to try to keep the mod podge from the sides while I was painting the top due to my previously mentioned glue glober status.  It seems like more work to paint the sides, but trust me it’s easier in the end.  After it was very dry, I added another coat to the top.

I love how they turned out!

ETA:

Y’all, my turkey button activity was featured on another blog!  I may be a super huge dork, but I cannot tell you haw excited I am about this.  🙂

Last one I promise!  🙂

Day 22/ 23.  The back of page 22 is blank except for a few stickers and some washi tape.  That’s why I like doing a front and back page instead of a 2 page spread.  It gives you more options.

Day 23/ 24.  Story time pics on a transparency.

Day 24/ 25. Pumpkin patch!  This one is right next to our house so we ran over one evening and met Libby and Will.  This pic is my fav!  Obviously Libby took it.  🙂

Day 25.  The kids were so over pumpkins by this point.

Day 25/26.  Birthday party at Home Depot.  (Did you know you could do this?  So cool.  All of the kids got to make a birdhouse.)

Day 26/27. Chocolate apples and oranges.  (Kate’s been eating the sprinkles.  She doesn’t have goth lipstick, promise.)

Day 27/28.  Playing at the Park for All Abilities.  Super fun.

Day 28.  More park pics.  (They’re in focus promise.  It’s harder than you think to take a picture of a picture and have it be in focus.)

Day 28/29.  I thought that Kate was going to be all over carving pumpkins, but she was not impressed.

Day 29/30.  She was much happier paining a pumpkin.  New felt project in the works.

Day 30/31.  Another Libby pic.  Yay!  We took the kids down to the fall festival put on by the city.  Fun.  🙂

Day 31.  I just realized that this is the only pic of my in this book.  Might need to work on that for December Daily.

Day 31.  Trick or Treat!  We always cheat and go to my mom’s house so I can take a Trick or Treat picture while it’s still light out.  🙂

Day 31.  Then we trick or treated in our neighborhood for the first time per Kate’s request.

Day 31.  <3

The back page has another fun pic from Kelly!

Continuing from where we left off…

Day 12/13.  We took Kate to see Brave at the dollar theatre.  🙂  I just glued the tickets right in.  I’m never super worried about the “archivalness” of things, and I’m not worried about them *at all* in a book like October Daily.  I didn’t even use page protectors.  lol.

Day 13/14.  I tried to cook dinner.  If you know anything about my cooking, you’ll know that the poison stickers are appropriate.  🙂

Day 14/ 15.  Just some general craftiness.

Day 15/ 16: Kate got a new puzzle.

Day 16/ 17.  Innerspace Caverns with my Dad.

Day 17/18.  I totally punched the holes for this page backwards.  Whoops.  On a regular page, I would have tried to find a way to remake this “correctly” but like I said, I’m pretty go with the flow where mini-books are concerned.

Day 18/ 19. Halloween party!  There are several pages for this one.  🙂

Day 19.  Kate’s costume.

Day 19.  Guests.

Day 19/ 20.  Birthday party.  I used the knock outs punch thingy on this one.  See the stars?  Love it.

Day 20.  Baby cousin.

Day 20/ 21.  Grand Mimi.

Day 21/22.  TV.

I’ll do one more October Daily post on Monday and then it’s on to Christmas stuff!  All of my December Daily paper came in today and I can’t wait to start playing with it!

So, I realize that I already blogged some layouts from my October Daily, but I finally finished everything including the covers and took new pictures.  I think it’s neat to see the album as a whole (especially seeing how the different page sizes/ transparencies work) so I’m posting the whole shebang again.  🙂  The way I structured it is that each day gets one page front and back and then I add pages as needed.  It’s different because the 2 pages are not a traditional spread, but I like it this way.  It gives me more freedom to tell the stories I want to tell.

This post will be heavy on the pictures and light on the text so please leave comments if you want more info on products or techniques!  (No seriously, please post comments.  I <3 them.)

Front cover.  I wanted to use acrylic pages for the covers, but I couldn’t find any!  So I used the chipboard from the back of the paper pack (and stole the chipboard from the back of my friend’s paper pack) to make some.  The lovely Kelly from Happy Soul Photography took this awesome picture of Kate at a fundraiser.  <3

Day 1.  Pumpkin counting work.

Days 1/2. Mailing invitations.

Days 2/3.  Cooking and gymnastics.

Days 3/4.  Day 4 is on a transparency so you can see day 5 peeking through.

Day 4/5.  Playing in the back yard.

Day 5.  I had a bunch of cute pictures from the 5th so I added an additional smaller page.  You can see day 6 peeking through.

Day 5/6.  Pumpkin patch!

Day 6.  Obviously I needed an extra page for the 6th.  🙂

Day 6/7.  In the past (December Dailies) I’ve made sure that each day has at least 1 full 6×6 page.  I decided that didn’t matter anymore.  I like the flexibility  especially if I’m using a hipstamatic print from my phone which prints 4×4.

Day 7/8.  Speaking of hipstamatic, I loved mixing phone pics and “real camera” pics in this project!  Makes it much easier to keep up with and gives the pages more variety.

Day 8/9. Family walk.

Day 9/10.  Decorations.

Day 10/11.  I love layering pages.  You can see day 12 peeking through and since it’s a transparency you can see a bit of day 13.  <3

Day 11/12.  Kate and her bestie Will decorated cookies on the 12th.  His mama, the fantastically talented Libby of Libby Ann Photography, took this picture of them.  ::swoon::  How cute are they?!?

I’ll post part 2 on Friday and part 3 on Monday so be sure to check back for those.  🙂

 

You guys get a bonus post today!  Last night, I couldn’t sleep because I had all of these awesome Thanksgiving crafty projects running through my head.  (That’s what I get for looking at Pinterest after work.)  What’s a girl to do except bust out the felt and go with it?  🙂

I finished up his little face this morning.  Kate loves it!  You don’t get a picture tutorial because there’s only so much I can fix in post when I’m crafting in the dark at 1AM.  That and operating the camera in a Benadryl fog seemed like a bad idea at the time.  lol.  It was super simple to make though.  I made a template out of some product packaging and cut out 6 feathers.  Then I traced a plate for the body and cut it out.  I found some old buttons in my scrapping stash and stitched them on and then cut little slits in the feathers for button holes.

I just freehanded the body and feet.  I ran a sharpie along the edge of the head/ neck to outline it since I only had 1 color of brown felt.  This project probably took about an hour and a half all told and it was super simple.  Inspiration comes from My Montessori Journey by way of Pink and Green Mama.

ETA: Y’all, another blog featured this post! Squee!!! Go check it out.

I found these great leaves in the Dollar Spot at Target.  They’re “table scatter” much the same as the ghosts and pumpkins that I made this counting work with earlier.

I had originally intended to make another math activity, but it didn’t go over quite so well.  Plan B!  I wrote her name in sharpie and had her place the leaves along the lines.  She loved it, and has chosen to work on this several more times.

Emily enjoyed this too.  She didn’t spell out her whole name, but she enjoyed placing the leaves all the same.

I had a lot of fun putting this page together.

The papers are pulled from several different October Afternoon lines.  I was about halfway done when I realized that I had used red, orange, yellow, and green.  Being a sucker for all thing rainbow, I looked in vain for some blue or purple paper.  (October Afternoon is cream based not white based so, while it looks fantastic mixed and matched with other pieces from its own collections, it’s not great to mix with other, often white based, patterns.)  (Holy run-on sentence Batman!  Not to mention several crimes against the comma!)  Never fear, I found some washi tape.

I quite like the scalloped edge on the yellow piece of paper.  I made it using the knock-outs system.  More on that later.

I traced around the paper with a brown marker, added some thickers and some trim and called it good.  Simple and quick, but I like it.

Those of you who know me know that I am a disaster in the kitchen, so easy snacks and lunches are a must around here.  Here’s an fun healthy snack I made for the girls.

Whole grain crackers, celery bites made with sun butter, cut up cheese sticks and strawberries.  The celery bites have been a surprisingly big hit.  The trick is to cut them up into bite sized bits so that there’s no stringiness to the celery.

And here they are enjoying their snack a fresco.  🙂

I came across this gem and knew I had to make it for Kate because how cute is it!  I started by painting some clothes pins to be the feathers.

I cut the edge off of a paper plate to be the base of the turkey and spaced the clothes pins around to see how many I would need it.  Looks like 12.

Then I painted them red, orange and yellow.

I used the plate as a stencil to make a circle out of brown construction paper.

And I modeled the rest of the turkey after this one.  I inked up the edges so that you could see them.

Then I gave it a face.

I cut some strips of paper in red, orange and yellow and glued them around the edge to show where the clothes pins should go.

At this point, I realized that I needed to laminate it so it didn’t fall apart, but since I’m not a teacher anymore I don’t have access to a laminating machine.  Mod Podge to the rescue!

I give this one 2 thumbs up.  Kate was a huge fan.  🙂