Merry Christmas

How does this keep happening to me? Lately every year Christmas has been sneaking up on me. This year I thought that I was on the ball, and I started with some of my Christmas prep the day after Halloween. Sadly, it still wasn't enough time for me, either that or my list is too long!

Posting will be a little light until after the holidays. I'm looking forward to spending the holidays with my family. I can't wait to see my kids open their presents on Christmas morning. Claire gets so excited for anything that has to do with Christmas- today it was the flashing lights on my Mom's Christmas tree. Every two minutes you'd hear "WOW, flashing lights. Mommy! Flashing lights!" I need want to take time to record all of these seemingly simple things. Oh to be 2 1/2 again! 

Merry Christmas & Happy Holidays.

Daily December- 6-12 (more or less!)

I cannot believe that it's Christmas next week. I feel like I still have so much to do. My daily album is coming along well though- of course I'm a few days behind, but it will all come together eventually.

 Day 6 was a big day, so I used a transparency to separate the events

 Day 8 & 9. Originally I had a card sleeve separating these pages, but when it came to actually working with the pictures that I had printed, the sleeve didn't work. So, I just added the pics that I had and a few simple embellishments.

 Day 10- doesn't get much simpler than this, a little journaling block

 Day 12- some happy tape, a snowflake brad and a little journaling block

Days 7 & 11 aren't quite done yet- hopefully I'll be able to add those ones soon.

Claire's new cards

I have been working so hard to finish making some presents for Claire for Christmas. Again, this is probably something I should have started in July if I actually wanted to get them all done in time. One of Claires favorite things to do is to seek out my wallet and take out ALL of my cards. Generally I don't mind, that it of course until I go to pay for something and I can't find my debit card. So I decided to make Claire some of her own cards for Christmas. Actually I'm going to fill a purse for her- of things that she might find on my purse- maybe then she'll leave mine alone!

 I started by opening a document in paint and resizing it to my desired size. Then I coloured the background, and added the font. For the pictures (the flowers, stars and cow I used a dingbat font. I love dafont for free fonts & dingbats). For the Curious George card I got the pictures from the George website. I also made the backs of the cards too- complete with the black magnetic stripe! I then printed off the cards, glued the cards together, and laminated them.

 I added the images on the back of the cards so that Claire can practice counting while she's in the shopping cart.

 The cards in her new (Auntie's old) wallet.

 Hopefully Claire will love paying for the groceries with her Moostercard- I sure would love a break on my grocery bill!

Daily December- the first 5 days

 I am so excited that I'm making such progress on my album. I head into Walmart to print my pics, so I work on a few pages at a time. I'm love that I'm actually completing pages- journaling and all! I usually get so caught up on making my pages perfect, that it takes me ages to do just one page. For this project (and hopefully as a go forward) I'm remembering that it's just important to tell the story.

Day 1- just added some rub ons and some journaling strips.

 Day 2- I adhered the picture with my happy tape, and added a bit of journaling to one of the card protectors.

 Day 3- Used some decorative tape to add the picture, and a sticker.

Day 4- more journaling and a picture that Claire drew.

Day 5- rub ons, a small transparency, a round sticker, and a journaling block.

I feel like I should mention that the posting has been/will be a little light for a while.

A teething (and not sleeping) baby + a very busy toddler = one super exhausted mother/blogger

Hope to have things return to normal soon :)

hello Santa

Oh boy. I took the kids to see Santa this weekend. Can't say that I predicted this outcome. I thought for sure that Claire (2 1/2 yrs.) would be the resistant & crying one- but she left that up to Simon (6 months). Well- that's not entirely true, moments after we snapped this pic she burst into tears and ran to Super Auntie (my Sister).

What's funny about this, is that we asked Claire about 30 mins after seeing Santa, if she had a good time. She replied yes she did. I love that she remembers having a good time, even though she burst into tears and had a death grip on Auntie.

12 Days of Christmas decoration

December 1!! I love December so much. I finally got our Christmas decorations out today, much to the delight of my daughter. What I discovered though, is that I have a lot of decorations for my tree, but not nearly enough for around my house. So, I went to work and made this wall decoration. This was a fairly quick project that I did, using my cricut cutter. In hindsight, perhaps I should have used more Christmas-y colours, but the colours looked so nice together. I used a silver paper behind the red one (12 lords a-leaping) because it's impossible to match two shades of red. Well, I tried a LOT of shades and couldn't find two that looked right together.

wooden joy sign

 As we get closer to Christmas I should be checking projects off of my list. Instead I keep adding projects to it because I'm so inspired by projects that I see on the blogs that I read. 

As I was walking through the isle of our dollar store the other day I was keeping an eye open for some materials that would make a good project. I came across this plain wooden sign, and I knew that it would make a great (& cheap!) Christmas craft.

What you need:

wooden sign (check the dollar store)

scissors

paint 

Mod Podge

paint brush

scrapbooking paper

 cardstock

 cricut/sillouette/exacto knife

 ribbon

1. This is what my sign looked like when I bought it. Not so exciting is it?

2. I painted the sign white, although, you really just need to paint the edges white. (Sorry, the photo's not great, I was trying very hard to get the project done during naptime!) I also painted the eyelets, which I wasn't going to do, but I may have been a little bit too generous with the paint, and I got a bit of paint on the eyelets, so I decided to go ahead and paint them. I'm glad I did now.

3. I cut a piece of scrapbooking paper to cover the sign. Once I made sure that it was the right size, I took the paper off, covered the wood with a coat of Mod Podge, and then placed the paper back on the sign. I smoothed out the paper, trying to get rid of all of the air bubbles. Then I applied another coat of Mod Podge on top of the paper.

4. I used my cricut cutter to cut out the word joy, but this could be just as easily done with an exacto knife. Once I had my letters placed where I wanted them, I lifted up each letter, one at a time, and slathered on some more Mod Podge, and then placed each letter back down. Once all of my letters were down, I painted the final coat of Mod Podge on to seal everything. (I'm sure you probably don't need to use this much, but I wanted to make sure that everything was stuck on there, and sealed very well!)

 The last thing that I did was replace the chain with a piece of ribbon. And there you have it- a new Christmas decoration for about $4.

Linking up with My Backyard Eden & Fingerprints on the Fridge.

Daily December- week 2

I love it when I get into my crafting groove. I love sitting down at our dining room table covering the entire surface with all of my craft supplies- making us eat supper on our laps sometimes! This is what my table looked like last week when I was working on my daily December album. Week 2 is ready to go now!

I'm using the card sleeve to seperate days 8 & 9.

day 10

Day 11. I'm waiting to add all of my embellishments when I actually do my pages. I'm going to keep it simple- tape ribbon, stickers and a little journaling.

Day 12- this might be my favorite! There's an overlay on the silver page that says live, laugh, love. A great mantra for any month, but especially December.

Day 13.

Day 14. Half way there!

origami crane mobile

 Not long after my son, Simon, was born I came across this post on Ohdeedoh and I knew that I wanted to make an origami crane mobile for Simon's room. I went to Michaels and picked up a pack of origami paper and went to work folding the cranes. Here's a tutorial, I think that it's the one that I used. I couldn't choose just one colour family to stick with, so I used them all. Once the cranes were all made, I threaded them on a piece of fishing line, tying a knot after each crane to keep them in place. 

Then, I headed to the Home Depot to get a piece of dowel to use as a mobile frame. I asked them to cut the dowel into 12 inch pieces. I probably could have made one a little bit bigger, but I wanted to keep the birds in a bit of a cluster. I used an acrylic white paint to paint the dowels. Then, I just made a cross with the sticks and secured them like that by wrapping the fishing line around them in a X shape. I tied on the strings of cranes to the mobile frame. The mobile is suspended from a hook in the ceiling. 

I'm so pleased with how the mobile turned out. I love all the colours. I think that it looks great hanging up in Simon's room- the only problem is that now Claire wants one for her room.

Linking up with Craft-O-Maniac & The DIY Show Off.

Daily December- week 1

I'm trying so hard to put the finishing touches on my Daily December album this year. I've wanted to do it for a few years now, but somehow I've never been organized enough to do it. If you've never heard of this project read more about it here. It essentially documents the month of December through photos and journaling. Here are my pages for the first week:

Cover

I've cut up a few sheets of plastic that you use for storing cards and placed them throughout the album.

The #6 is actually on a transparency, just to add another element to the album.

I also cut out a few tags using my cricut. I thought they might be good to journal on- I might take them out if I don't end up using them.

freezer stenciling

Not too long ago I discovered this fantastic blog called I Am Momma- Hear Me Roar. If somehow you aren't already a huge fan of the blog then you need to go check it out. Anyway, on there you'll find an awesome tutorial on freezer stenciling. You really need to watch Cheri's video and then you too will be set to freezer stencil. I have so many more projects that I want to make using this technique.

This is my newest one. If this doesn't want to make me do the dishes then I don't know what will.

I'm not going to do an in-depth tutorial here since Cheri's is so awesome- but here are the basics. You need fabric paint, paint brush, t-shirts (or tea towels), freezer paper (parchment paper will not work, not that I tried that first or anything!), and an iron. I also used my cricut cutter to cut out my shapes, but you could use a utility knife and trace out a shape.

Once you have the shapes cut out and place them on your shirt (or towel). Run the iron over the freezer paper. It seriously only takes a few seconds for the paper to stick.

Then paint and let dry

And that's all there is to it! I love my new dish towel, unfortunately it hasn't made me want to do my dishes any faster.

I also made a little shirt for my son Simon. I'm thinking I probably should have bought the next size up in the shirt, it doesn't look like he'll be wearing it too much longer!

thumb print snowmen tags

 In the spirit of finding Christmas crafts to make, Claire (and I) made these thumb print snowmen. I've seen the snowmen done before using the whole foot, but I thought that this might be a little cleaner! I cut out some tag shapes using my cricut cutter. (You could use a large circle punch or just freehand it if you don't have a cricut.) Then Claire made the body of the snowmen on the tags ("all by self"). We waited for the snowmen to dry before Claire painted on the hats. I just added a bit of bakers twine through the hole so that we can attach the tags to gifts, or hang them as ornaments on our tree. (I'm pretty sure I won't be able to give any of these away!)

turkey handprints

I just love crafting with Claire, and I'm always on the look out for new crafts and things to do with her. She loves painting, especially when she can cover her hands in paint! This is her latest creation. I love that she's going to have these paintings to look back on.

 

I love this time of year. We had our first snow flurries yesterday, which probably means that we should get our winter tires put on, BUT for me, it really means, break out the Christmas decorations. I've got a lot more crafting to get done before Christmas, and I feel like I have a plan to get it done. I should be back to regular posting this week- and I've got lots of projects to show off!