Crafts – Taking on Today

DIY Potato Head Felt Party Game

November 27, 2013April 23, 2013 by Kelley

I know it’s been quiet on the blog for the past couple of weeks, but so much has been going on! I have a new baby nephew, my daughter had her 5th birthday, and I’m working to launch my photography business.

For today though, I wanted to share with you a quick preview of a DIY party game that I made for my daughter’s birthday party. It was fun to make and a real hit with the kids. My daughter asked for an “All Disney” birthday party. She’s had Disney Princess and Tinkerbell parties the past couple of years, but this year she wanted ALL THINGS DISNEY. Perhaps inspired by our Disney Word vacation this past December, but maybe just because she has a hard time picking her favorites. Since we were inviting girls and boys, we focused on Rapunzel, Tinkerbell, Cars, and Toy Story. I wasn’t sure what to do for Toy Story, but after browsing Pinterest, I came up with the idea to make a felt Mr./Mrs. Potato Head to put on the wall and kids could just take turns arranging it however they wanted, or we could do sort of a “pin the tail on the donkey” game with it.

Since we moved this past year and still have a lot of boxes around the house, I opted to make the Mr. Potato Head from part of a large cardboard moving box, and I used Krylon Easy-Tack Repositionable Adhesive to make the felt stick, and yet be removable. Then I mounted the cardboard on two large pieces of blue posterboard, so that accessories could be attached around the Potato Head figure, and not just on it. So my daughter and I went to Hobby Lobby and bought some felt in all the appropriate colors.

Using some templates from Potato Head quiet books as inspiration, I drew out all the forms for the different parts on paper. I’m no artist, but I think I managed to get the shapes looking right. I designed at least two different options for each piece: eyes, eyebrows, ears, nose, mouth, arms, shoes, and hats. I also made a purse for Mrs. Potato Head. Then I traced them onto the felt (I used a Sharpie on the light colors and white chalk on the dark colors), and cut them out. I used Sharpie to decorate a few of the pieces (I drew lines to separate the lips and the teeth, and drew eye lashes on Mrs. Potato Head’s eyes). I also cut out smaller pieces of felt to finish some of the pieces (like black circles on the white eyes, a flower for Mrs. Potato Head’s hat, and earrings for her ears). I used Tacky Glue to glue those on so they’d stay together permanently.

Here’s the final results! A sample Mr. Potato Head and Mrs. Potato Head. Maybe I’ll add pictures of more of the pieces later, once I gather them all back up.

Here was some of my inspiration:
http://jocelynandjason.blogspot.com/2011/11/mr-potato-head-quiet-book-pages-10-11.html
http://pinterest.com/pin/225320787579325953/

I’m linking this up to the weekly One Project at a Time link party hosted by A Bowl Full of Lemons!

Thanks for reading my blog. Time to take on the rest of my day!

Easter Egg Paper Craft for Kids

March 27, 2013March 27, 2013 by Kelley

My daughter loves to do crafts, and we figured what better way to break-in the new craft table in her playroom than to do a fun Easter craft together! I was inspired by this post that Kelly (not me) posted over on The Pretty Bee. Kelly and her son made some cute Easter egg decorations with strips she cut out of scrapbook paper with her paper cutter. I don’t know the age of her son, but my daughter loves to cut paper, and it’s a good readiness skill for Kindergarten, so I just handed her a stack of pastel office and scrapbook paper and let her go to town cutting the paper into strips.

Here’s what she ended up with…
I printed out an Easter Egg template that I had from last year on to white card stock, and I cut out the center. Then we glued the strips on to the back of the template. On The Pretty Bee, Kelly glued the strips to a plain piece of cardstock and then put the template over it at the end, but I somehow missed that detail. I wish we would have done it that way that way though, because I think the strips would have stayed down a little better. She also glued them horizontally, but my little artist wanted them to be vertical stripes, so that’s how we did it.

The one fun part about doing it upside down though is that we could only peek and see how it was coming along. When we were all finished, Andrea flipped the paper over and gasped and said it was “sooo beautiful”! It was priceless. I love how excited she gets about her crafts and artwork. I’m not very artistic myself, so I wasn’t sure what I’d think of the crooked cuts on her strips of paper, but I actually think the imperfections from having her cut it on her own really make it unique.

To give it a little more structure, I then glued a solid piece of cardstock to the back of it. That’s when I realized I should have done it differently in the first place, but oh well.
Here’s the final product (before I trimmed the excess paper off).

Then, as often happens, Andrea was inspired by our craft to do another Easter egg craft on her own. While I was cooking dinner last night, she made this:

That’s a sleeping moon in the middle of the egg with a nose and a smile, and no eye, because his eyes are closed, she says. She wanted it to be for the Easter Bunny, so she cut out some other paper to write a note to go with it. She asked us to help her spell out her message, and then she drew a tiny bunny and carrot in the corner for the Easter Bunny. (All this has her wondering if the Easter Bunny is a boy or a girl bunny, by the way. Anyone know???)
All in all, it was a very fun and successful afternoon/evening of crafting I thought.
Andrea can’t wait to do another Easter craft on her new table, so I’m sure we’ll be doing more over the next few days.

Happy Easter!

Thanks for reading my blog. Time to take on the rest of my day!

Kitchen Table to Kids’ Table

March 26, 2013March 26, 2013 by Kelley

We moved last August and since the move, I’ve never taken the time to get my combined office and craft really functional. It had too much furniture in it, and needed more shelving. Last Friday, I had enough and started changing it all up. I was going to post about the progress I’ve made in that room, but instead decided to focus this post on the first thing I changed, which actually involved a table that I moved OUT of the room. Moving the table out and freeing up that corner of my office was the first step and it made a huge impact in my room. And I was so excited about how it turned out that it motivated me to keep working on the rest of my office.

In our old house, we had a pretty generic kitchen table with the natural wood top and white painted legs (similar to this). I bought the table shortly after graduating from college for cheap at a discount furniture store, but it worked, and it actually looked pretty nice in our last two houses. But the new kitchen has darker wood floors and cream colored wood trim, so the table was just NOT going to work anymore as our kitchen table. So I had the movers put it in my office/craft room, thinking I could work on craft projects with my daughter there. But that never happened, as she preferred to work in her playroom. So the table just took up a lot of space in my office and junk got piled on it. I also realized Andrea was outgrowing her little kiddie table that Santa brought when she was just 2. Brainstorm! I realized I could cut the legs down and move it into her playroom. It’s got a lot more real estate than her kiddie table, which is never big enough for her sprawling arts and crafts projects these days. The only problem was that I didn’t like the idea that if I cut all the legs, I couldn’t easily put it back to its original state again. So I went to Home Depot and looked for replacement table legs, but they were pricey and would have cost over $60, which was more than I wanted to spend. But then I found some primed square balusters for only $9 and they were long enough (42″) that I could buy two and cut them in half to make shorter legs for the table. So I brought them home, pulled out the circular saw and cut them in half. Then I took the legs off the old table, lined up the new legs, marked and drilled holes in them, and then screwed them in to the table similar to how the original legs attached.

Here’s the final result:

My daughter LOVES it. She has so much space for her projects now and there’s room for her bins of markers, and crayons, and colored pencils to be on the table with her while she works. The table is also a little bit taller than her previous table, so she won’t outgrow it anytime soon, and it’s a little easier for me to sit with her so we can do projects together. Success!!!

The office/craft room is coming along quite nicely, but I will have to post about that later this week.

I’m linking this up to the weekly One Project at a Time link party hosted by A Bowl Full of Lemons!

Thanks for reading my blog. Time to take on the rest of my day!

Teacher Appreciation Cookies

March 19, 2013March 19, 2013 by Kelley

This week is Teacher Appreciation Week at my daughter’s school. Monday, everyone brought flowers for the teachers to put together into a flower arrangement, so we picked out some flowers over the weekend for Andrea to bring in. Today, students were asked to bring in a snack or sweet treat for their teachers. I talked to Andrea and she wanted to make chocolate chip cookies for her teachers. I suggested we put them in some Ball jars. We went to made a double batch of my favorite chocolate chip cookie recipe (BEST-EVER Chewy Chocolate Chip Cookies). They really are the best-ever chocolate chip cookies, and definitely chewy, which I love.

I bought a cookie scoop to use for the first time ever, and I *loved* it. I will never go back to scooping cookie dough with a spoon. The scoop I bought is slightly larger than the standard size I think – it holds about 1 1/2 tablespoons. It was sold as a “small” scoop at my grocery store, but from what I can tell, the standard size for a cookie scoop is 1 tablespoon. As a result, my cookies were a little bigger than the original recipe, but perfectly round and pretty consistent in size between the cookies. I overfilled the scoop in the first couple of batches, so those cookies were a bit bigger, but I found out they were slightly too big to fit even in the wide-mouth Ball jars I bought. I was able to fix that by just barely filling the cookie scoop for the remainder of the batches, and those cookies fit just fine in the jars.

I used two different types of chocolate chips – Ghirardelli bittersweet chips and Nestle milk chocolate chips. I’ve used Nestle semi-sweet before, but I thought they were too sweet for the recipe, so I was curious how the other types would taste. I definitely preferred the taste of bittersweet chocolate chips that the recipe calls for, even though I’m not normally a fan of bittersweet chocolate, it seemed to match the cookie best. The only downside was that the Ghirardelli chips were a little wider and flatter than the Nestle chips, so the cookies with the Nestle chips turned out a little prettier with beautiful lumps from the chocolate chips.

Here are picture of a few of the cookies so you can see how beautiful they were and the difference made by the two different shaped chocolate chips. (The two lumpier ones in the front are the Nestle ones, and the two in the back are the Ghirardelli ones.)

For the jars, I traced the flat metal lid on white cardstock, and then had Andrea draw a picture for each of her teachers and write her name on each one. Then I cut them out and glued them on to the lids. (TIP: I found I needed to cut out a smaller circle of cardboard to glue between the lid and the cardstock to fill the gap from the raised edge on the lid.) I made little labels for the each jar that had the teacher’s name and said, “Thanks for making me one smart ‘cookie’!” I designed the labels in Microsoft Word, printed them on cardstock, and then cut out and hole punched the tags. Then I tied the tags on with some cute ribbon I picked up in the Target Dollar Spot a while back.

And here’s the final result! Andrea was so excited to bring them in to school this morning.