RaptorMama

I know I said I was going to do the front and back cover today.  I lied!  Get over it.  🙂  When I sat down to get started, I remembered that last year I waited to do the back cover until I had done the last page.  That because I’m using acrylic pages as a base for the front and back cover and they are see through so I kind of need to wait and see what the last page is going to look like before I make the cover.  I did, however, get the front cover done.  Yay me!

   

You’ll notice that they are mirror images of each other and that’s because it’s see through.  🙂  The main piece of paper is double sided and I loved both sides so I used it here.  The other elements are placed so that they cover the back of the page.  Does that make sense? The acrylic base page is sandwiched between them.  They are also covering the adhesive.

If anyone is interested, I can look up the manufacturers for this stuff.  I’m just too lazy busy to dig through the pile of paper at the moment.  So far, I’m just using leftovers from last year, though if we’re being honest I overbought last year so I would have plenty of goodies to work with this year.  🙂

I’ve taken lots of pictures today and the plan is to upload, edit and print a few of them tonight so they are ready to go tomorrow.  Anyone else doing this?  I’d love to see your pages!

I haven’t blogged in so long it’s disgraceful.  No more!  I’m starting December Daily tomorrow (um, I guess technically today as it’s after midnight) and my goal is to post my pictures every day.  Anyone want to place bets on the likelihood of that happening?  lol.

My plan is to take pictures during the day and then upload, edit and print them after Kate has gone to bed/ I’m done working for the night.  I’ll then make the page the next day either during Kate’s nap time or during Kate and Mama craft time if she’s wants to play.  Last year Kate made 2 of our December Daily pages and they are some of my favorites!

That’s last year’s on the left and, as you can see, it ended up being quite a thick book.  I went ahead and cut down all of my old Christmas paper to 6 inches by 6 inches as that’s the size book I ended up going with and bought an acrylic album that I’ll use for the covers and probably 2 or 3 other internal pages.  That’s what’s stacked up on the right.  I love the 6×6 size because it’s manageable, plus you can get 4 pages from a single 12×12 sheet of paper.  I’m cheap y’all.

Michael works from home in our office/ art/ craft room so I will be doing December Daily at the kitchen table.  To facilitate that, I went ahead and pulled all of my old Christmas paper and embellishments, plus anything else in the red/ green/ blue color family that I thought might be fun to play with.  The goal is not to have to go rooting through the office 15 times a day while Michael is trying to work.

   

Here’s a random assortment of goodies I’ll be incorporating into the book.  I can’t wait to use the washi tape!  (It’s like printed masking tape.  I don’t know why it’s so awesome, but it is!!!)

I also cleaned out my pink tote thing and so it just has tools and goodies for this project. Hopefully I can keep this project at least somewhat contained since it’s in our kitchen.  🙂

The plan for tomorrow today is to take lots of pictures and make the front and back covers.  And yes, I’m still doing Project Life.  I’m a bit behind, but I plan on keeping up with both for the month of December.  And yes, I’m a little bit crazy.  It’s all good.  🙂

Remember the rice that Kate’s been playing with for a while?  Well, I’m she’s starting to get bored with it so we decided to make rainbow rice!  By the way, like most things on the blog this was not an original idea.  🙂

First, grab your materials: rice, ziplock bags, food coloring and rubbing alcohol.  Put rice in the bags, add food coloring and alcohol.

Let the kids smoosh the rice around in the bags.

The girls loved this part so much that we ended up making 6 colors instead of 3.  Well, that and I love doing things in rainbow order.  🙂

Seriously, it’s that easy.  I think we might dye pasta next to make necklaces.  I saved the bags.

It was super awesome looking when all of the colors were separate, but it looks quite nice now too that all of the colors are mixed up.  It’s like confetti.  I’ll have to take another pic of it and add it.  I totally recommend this.  Super easy and super fun.  I’m not going to lie, playing with the rice is super messy though.

 

We gave Kate her very own sketch book a few months ago and she loves it.  Michael also has several sketch books and she really enjoys getting to draw with him.  We encourage her to use one page at a time and then put the date at the bottom.  She usually ends up using it once a week or so and I think it will end up showing her progression quite nicely.  Plus, it makes me feel a bit less guilty about throwing away the approximately 3000 other pieces of art she creates a week.  🙂

So as may of you undoubtedly know, Halloween in pretty much my favorite holiday.   I am so excited to start some spooky art projects!  I also get the feeling that Kate is supposed to start learning to use scissors and glue, thus this project was born.  🙂

First I cut some strips of orange paper and drew lines on the to show where Kate and Abby should cut.

Abby, who just turned 4, totally got it.  She cut apart the strips and glued them in the pumpkin shape.

Kate clearly needs some more practice with the scissors.  It seems like her hands are still too small for them.  No problem, she ripped up the strips and I cut out some squares for her.  She was all over the glue stick though.  🙂

And here are the finished masterpieces!

 

I’ve decided to get back on the blogging bandwagon.  We’ll see how long it lasts this time.  lol.  I have a lot of fun stuff to put up, I just need to actually write the posts.

Here’s a scrapbook page a made a few weeks ago.  I’m so in love with these little letters from October Afternoon.  🙂

I bought this glimmer mist (it’s like spray glitter) forever ago and I’ve never used it.  I decided to try it on a layout this weekend and I’m in love.  Like I might have to go and buy 15 or so more colors this weekend.  🙂

Long time no blog.  What can I say, we’ve been on vacation.  🙂  I do have something fun to share today though.  I decided to make Kate a quiet book.  What is a quiet book you say?   As far as I can tell, it’s a reusable activity book.  There are tons of cool quiet books on Pinterest and this one even had free printable templates.  Sign me up!  I finished my first page last night and I’m really happy with it.

The directions called for fusible interfacing, but I just hand stitched everything.  I actually attempted to use the fusible webbing on another page but everything about it made me crazy.  I’ll post more about it later once I figure out how to make that page work for me.  I think that it also called for velcro for this page, but I went with snaps instead as it seemed like velcro would snag on the felt.

Oh and the flower pot doubles as a pocket to hold the petals.  How cute is that.  🙂

We decided to meet some friends downtown today to go to the Children’s Museum.  The plan was to meet up at 10:00 when they opened and then get lunch after letting the kids play for a bit.  What’s that you say?  They don’t open until noon on Sunday?  Curses!  And of course we’ve already parked in the garage downtown and have to hang around until the museum opens to have our parking validated.  Le sigh.  For once, I was glad we were running late.  We headed over to a coffee shop to grab a snack.

As we were walking to the coffee shop, I noticed some more cows.  Have I mentioned the cows?  They are all over Austin right now.  There are something like 47 of them.  So far, we’ve stumbled across three of them and taken pictures.  It’s like a sickness I tell you.  If I see one, I must take a picture of Kate with it.  Luckily she’s a pretty good sport.

After wasting as much time as possible in the coffee shop, we still had 45 minutes before the museum was set to open.  Luckily there were a lot more cows!

This one was in full sun.  When the high is 109, full sun is not your friend.

Luckily this cow was in the shade.  And since we’re in Austin, there was live music.  🙂

I think this cow may have been their favorite.  They really liked the grass.

Moooo.

Michael put his foot down here and said that there was no way we were crossing 1st St to take a picture with a cow.  Fair enough.  I’m counting it anyway.

All in all, we added 9 new cows!  I actually think Kate had more fun walking around finding cows than she did at the museum.  To be fair, she and I come to the museum a few times a month and we rarely go hunting for cows.  🙂

I was working on a cross stitch project the other day and Kate decided she wanted to try it too.  Obviously she’s too little for that, but I thought she might be ready for one of those lacing cards.  After all, she’s pretty much mastered stringing beads.  I was going to look for one on Amazon, but then I figured, why not just make one?  I covered some chipboard (I have tons from packs of page protectors) with some paper.  Then I cut out some shapes and drew a reverse outline (?) with a sharpie marker.  Punched a few holes with my crop-a-dile and we were good to go!

Oh, I used a yarn needle from my knitting stash and some yarn as the thread.  I tied the thread to the needle on one end and the paper on the other.  I realized afterwards that I could have just as easily had her use one of the shoe laces that came with the bead lacing set.  In fact, the next time I get around to knitting something I’m totally going to switch them out.  🙂

She loved it!  She still needs help to do it, obviously, but she had a lot of fun getting to “sew” like mama.  🙂