September 2011 – My Crazy Blessed Life!

We are blessed to have two huge trees in our front yard that shed pretty yellow colored leaves each fall. My girls really love the leaves because they look like the “star leaves” from the kids movie Land Before Time. They call them dinosaur leaves. Well they have begun changing and falling, and even though our entryway now has a warm fall painting (from my previous post) I decided it was still too empty. The girls and I went out one day last week and picked a bunch of pretty yellow leaves and brought them inside and pressed them all morning and through nap time between wax paper under very heavy books. While they were napping I got out my paraffin wax melter I had gotten at a garage sale for 5 dollars brand new never used (great for feet and hands) and I melted some paraffin wax so it was ready to go when they got up.

When they got up we used my scrapbooking heart punch and punched a heart out of the middle of half of the leaves and kept the hearts to put on the unpunched ones.

After we punched out the hearts we dipped the leaves by the stem (the girls loved doing this and giggled the whole time). At first I let them lay on wax paper to dry until I realized that doing so made the back half of the leaf’s wax come off! Evidently the hot wax on wax made it stick to the wax paper. So I found just setting them on the kitchen counter was fine and when dry they came right up totally in tact. I dipped the punched hearts (since there was no stem to keep tiny fingers safe) and then laid them directly on the unpunched leaves (previously dipped). The hot wax was adhesive enough.

Once they were all dry I laid them out in a pattern that I liked..

Next I took some twine from our gardening stuff and tied a single knot around each stem spacing the leaves approximately the same distance apart until they were all tied on and then I hung it in our entryway. Now I really love how fall it looks 🙂

Well there it is, when we were done Katie laughed and said, “We are so silly momma, dipping leaves in wax.” I’ll be silly with my girls any day, these memories are priceless to me.

Thanks for reading 🙂

Johanna

craft

Fall Painting With My Artsy Girls :)

September 16, 2011 crazyblessedlife

I love painting with my girls and I decided last week while decorating for fall that my entry way needed a fall painting. I love involving my girls in any painting/craft I can so I grabbed a canvas and squirted it with a bright orange colored paint and let my girls finger paint it until it was covered. I then let it dry and took some scrapbooking sticker letters in different shapes and sizes, spelling out some of my favorite words that remind me of fall and put them in the right hand corner.

Next the girls fingerpainted the entire thing again over the orange and stickers with a nice green paint (knowing the first coat of color would leak under the stickers a bit for a distressed look). Without letting the green totally dry up I let the girls use wet scrunched paper towels dipped in brown red and yellow paints to dab all over the canvas. Because the paper towels are wet it removed a bit of green in some places to let the orange color come through and also gave the overall painting a distressed look. I didn’t let them do this for very long or the whole thing would end up just a brown mess. Once we were done though, each fall color (orange, green, brown, red and yellow) were represented in a nice painting.

This I let totally dry and then peeled up the stickers.

I really love how it turned out and it warms up our entryway nicely 🙂 Oh and it cost nothing, I was given several nice canvases recently by a sweet friend who encourages my artistic habit and I had all the paint and stickers. Hope you enjoyed it!

Happy crafting!

Johanna 🙂

craft, Domesticity, stay-at-home-mom

Bulletin Board Update

September 15, 2011 crazyblessedlife

Ok, so… a while back I posted on my Facebook that I wanted to use some old bulletin boards from college days and update them to be used as art display boards for during preschool year for my girls. Well I got some great feedback and was all set to do something awesome with them when I went to Target a few weeks ago and saw these:

On CLEARANCE! For 2.49! Ok, I didn’t want to spend anything on this project but I bought 2 for 5 dollars. They were much more suited to my end goal of changing out art every week. So every little paper they brought home was proudly displayed but for a limited time (a week) then retired to the school year box. I’m really an anti-clutter girl and at the end of the year I plan on letting them choose their absolute favorites and keeping only those. These boards have a big magnetic/dry erase side that I could just put up some art with magnets. Then on the cork side there are big rubber bands so no sharp push pins needed(one of my concerns with a 3 and 4 year old) and the papers just slide under the rubber band and stay in place! Ok, and I loved the green color since the girl’s room is done in green, pink and white.

So once I got my cheap finds home I decided to personalize them with their initials in a girly wooden cutout from hobby lobby (99 cents each, plus 40% off coupons made them 59 cents each). I painted the initials pink and used a white paint pen to put polka dots on them. I hot glued the initials in the lower right corner of the boards.

I also wanted to make magnets to match, so I got 8 clothespins and painted them with the same pink and then dotted them with the white paint pen also.

Next I found some plain magnets from a past project.

I painted them pink also because the show under the clothespins.

Then I hot glued them to the clothespins and each girl’s board got four of these each.

I hung them in the hallway right outside their room so they can see their work displayed every day! My girls loved it and I like how it turned out also. My total cost was less than 7 dollars.

Now, I am redoing the other old boards for my craft room 🙂 I’ll post on those when they are done!

Happy crafting!

Johanna 🙂

craft, Domesticity

College-ruled T-shirts

September 1, 2011 crazyblessedlife

So I recently made these really adorable and easy shirts for my girls. They are made to look like a piece of notebook paper and remind me of school, so with school just beginning for the year and office supplies everywhere for sale… well you get where my motivation to create these came from.

Here is a quick and simple tutorial for making them:

1. First you need a white T-shirt (I got the girl’s shirts a while back at Hobby Lobby when they did the 50% off shirts so they cost 1.50 each. You will also need blue and red paint (fabric paint or acrylic with fabric paint additive), a paint brush, poster board to put inside the shirt so the paint doesn’t leak to the back and wide masking tape.

2. Next, take the masking tape and tape off the shirt where you want your blue lines to be. I found that the extra wide masking tape was perfect for the size of space I wanted between the blue lines. I also just let the tape go over the edges and stick to the table to hold the shirt in place as I painted.

3. Paint between the tape with the blue paint and let dry.

4. Remove the tape.

5. Tape again where you want the red line to go vertically.

6. Paint red between the tape.

7. Let this dry and the next part is optional, I had a black paint pen and let Katie help me write her name “at the top of the sheet of paper” 🙂 I wrote it and she helped guide my hand, so its not perfect but its personal and that’s what counts for me. She loved helping and when it was Bella’s turn she loved it too.