Girls Craft Camp

I enjoy doing crafts with kids. My good friend has a daughter who is 8 and I wanted to do a little craft camp class for her and some friends. So each Friday for about a month I had 6 girls for a couple of hours working on art projects. My oldest enjoyed having the girls come over for crafts. The younger two stayed napping each week. My oldest acts super goofy when they come over...which equals LOTS of excitement for her.

Here are some of the projects we did together.

Freezer Paper Stenciled shirts. They each chose their image. I cut it out. They painted it. They each loved their shirts!

These really neat black glue and watercolor resist paintings. You make black puffy paint and then the next week the girls used watercolors. I forgot to take a picture of most of them, but they all turned out beautifully.

Corn Syrup Paintings. These are really neat when dried. It creates a glossy raised painting.

I found freezing them helped them to harden quicker!

The classic Shrinky Dinks! These were a huge hit.

And we painted Prayer Rocks (to place on their pillow at night as a reminder to pray. I gave them a poem to go along with them.)

These hot rock paintings were probably the biggest hit. They were fun. You just place rocks in the oven on a baking sheet. Take them off and use crayons to paint on them.

School Bus Cookie

In celebration of my oldest daughter's first time to school we made school bus sugar cookies. They had lots of fun creating their own cookies. And it was fun to have friends join us.

Cookie idea found at Pillsubury

Astronaut Helmet For Sis

My oldest is a little obsessed with costumes right now. She had high hopes of finding an astronaut costume. We luckily found one on the cheap and now she needs a helmet to go along with it. We are making it from paper mache and hoping it works...

either way it's made for a fun project to do a little at a time.

Messy projects are right up our little boy's alley. He loves making messes at this age. hehe.

Freshly Squeezed Orange Juice

I don't think I ever made freshly squeezed orange juice. We bought a big box of oranges from our food co-op and juiced a lot of them. I think we had fresh orange juice on Saturday mornings for quite a few weeks.

My youngest daughter especially enjoyed squeezing the oranges and lemons for lemonade. And my son enjoyed making a mess :)

Other Projects from July-August

Very random...some little projects completed. I've got to take pictures of other projects and then I'll add them.

I created this collage for Melodie in photoshop. I framed it for her as a gift along with a picture I took of her completing one of her Marathons. The collage lists all of the places she's ran half and full marathons. She's incredible!

Turned this old picture into a chalk board. It's pretty big!

Added black pom-pom trim to the nursery lamp. Love the "pop" of black. It goes well with the Mary Poppins art.

Sailing the Ocean Blue

My oldest really wanted to build this sail boat as shown on frugal family fun blog. I showed it to her and she immediately wanted to make it. We got the easle and drew the sun, birds, ocean, etc. Then we made oars with golf clubs, cut out cardboard and duct tape. We made looking glasses (binoculars) out old wrapping paper tubes. They had fun pretending to sail the ocean blue.

Learning New Homemaking Skillz

This summer has been such a blast. I hate to see it go. Some of the fun has been learning new homemaking skills. That sounds cheesy, but there are few things I love more than creating things for my family and friends, and our home.

Here are a few new things I learned this summer, that I loved making!

My husbands favorite pie is cherry pie. Not the kind you buy in a box at the grocery store, but real cherry pie.

My friend Rachael brought over lots of cherries and a pitter and we spent the afternoon with our kids pitting and dehydrating cherries. Then I made a cherry pie from scratch. It was DELISH!

I even tried braiding my homemade pie crust. Ya, I definitely need more practice! The thing in the middle is supposed to be a cherry decoration. haha.

I told Rach that I really want to start collecting pretty cake plates. She found this at the D.I. for me. It's gorgeous. The cloak has flowers etched into the side of the glass. And it's tall enough to fit a 3-4 layer cake inside. LOVE IT!

Happy Birthday Mom!

I also made jam for the first time by myself. I used the sure jell that calls for less sugar. Woa baby it's still a lot of sugar. I want to plant blackberry and raspberry bushes next year. Can't wait for raspberry jam! My favorite.

Dried apricots. I used to love eating these in Ukraine. I didn't love mine as much. I'm hoping to learn more about dehydrating food!

And last, but not least....the cake I made for Tom W. (you'd really have to know Tom W. to understand this cake). My dad was laughing until he was crying. I LOVE when dad does that. It was quite the hoot and so much fun to make. I was cracking up the whole time. I just drew on the body with a straight tip, and used a grass tip for the hair. The hostess snowballs added the perfect touch. Oh and don't forget the chocolate chips.

Pins

I know this is insignificant to anyone but me but I wanted to rememember it. A month or so ago, I was in Mia's room and I think I was trying to calm her down or something. I don't remember all the details. But there was a sewing pin and some paper. I poked the pin in the paper to draw a picture, or write her name or something. She was so tired and upset that I didn't think she would remember. But it did calm her down.

The next evening she created this in her room and came to show me. It's Toodee from Yo Gabba Gabba. It's an amazing rendition too!

Mia, you are one creative child. And you never forget a detail of anything we do together. I love you!

Play: May 2011

We had some good weather in May, not a ton, but some. When it was nice outside, we jumped at the chance to hang outside.
My favorite day is Saturday. I love when our whole family spends time outside.This day was one of those perfect Saturdays. The kids loved playing with this make-shift water table.



My sister-in-law passed this book down to us. It's a great little book on painting in a variety of different ways. The girls painted with Q-tips and here is my youngest little girl's Q-tip painting.



I am wanting to incorporate numbers more into our day. The girls can count to 20 but they still don't understand the concept of numbers holding values.

I set up a store with price tags. I gave them real money (because this was not a planned activity and I didn't have fake money) and a plastic grocery sack. One at a time they came to the store and bought what they would like. I had them count out the money and pay me.

I think this helped a little bit with the concept of numbers. And since we've been practicing in other activities with numbers too, they are starting to get it.






I was at Winco one night and saw that I could buy diff. colored lentils in the bulk section. So I got a little bit of each color and let them play with them outside in a sensory tub. They LOVED this. And the feel of it was really neat.






My oldest daughter: almost 4, youngest daughter, almost 3, and son-1.5

Embroidery Hoop Tutorial

I contributed a tutorial on the Riley Blake (Designer Fabrics) blog yesterday. The tutorial is on how to make fabric embroidery hoops. I stained my hoop a dark brown and added some embellishments on a few.

Check it out!