Author: Raptor Mama

Libby and I found these lists of interview questions to ask your child every year on Pinterest and promptly headed over to Archivers for supplies.  She decided to ask them every year on her son’s birthday, and I opted to do them every year on the first day of school.  (Wait, my baby is about to start school? No!  I don’t believe it!)  First, let’s look at the supplies.

   

You’ll need three roles of this awesome glitter ribbon.  Actually, you should probably go ahead and buy 4 or 5 roles just to have on hand, but you only need 3 for this project.  🙂

   

A pack of gitter thickers (this one had exactly enough 1s, but I would check your pack and make sure you don’t need 2) and a bunch of different colors of Prima Flowers (they’re old so no link, but you can find them on ebay- search for prima milk bottle flowers).  I’m going with a rainbow theme so I had pink, orange, yellow, green, turquoise, and purple.

   

I got some bling to put in the centers of the flowers.  You’ll want to get this tool too.  It makes it easy to separate the bling and place it in the flowers.

   

A tape runner, an album and some cardstock and you’re all set.  Funny story about the cardstock.  I like a specific texture on my cardstock, orange peel.  They had all of the colors I wanted except for the purple so I bought it with a smooth texture.  As I started working with it though, I realized that it would drive me batty.  So today I paid 5 dollars in shipping for a dollar worth of cardstock.  Totally worth it.

I came up with 10 questions.  It was quite the challenge to come up with questions that would be relevant for both a 3 year old and an 18 year old, but I think I came up with some good ones.   Michael helped me to format formatted them like I wanted.  I want to ask Kate the same questions on the first and last days of school, so he made 3 columns: one for the question and one for each answer.  I also wanted to have her write her name on the first and last days of school.  After I printed all of them, I trimmed each page down to 8 inches by 8 inches, though I wish that I had measured the page protectors first.  These particular page protectors are a wee bit bigger.  Oh well.

   

Cut 2 pieces of ribbon to 8 inches and put some tape on the back.

Then just stick them down.  🙂  Stick 3 Prima Flowers down in the lower right hand corner.  I’m going in rainbow order, and I used the previous color for the flowers (pink flowers on orange cardstock, orange flowers on yellow cardstock, etc.)

   
Then use the tool to put the bling in the middle of each flower and add the number for the grade.  Kate will do 2 years of Montessori preschool, so I did “M1”, “M2”, “K”, “1”, “2”, etc. all the way up to “12”.

 

Right after I finished this page, I realized that I would have used orange flowers on the yellow instead of green.  ::sigh::

And here’s the full page.  These will go on the right side and I’ll put an 8×8 picture of Kate on the left.  My plan currently is to take a picture in front of our house on the first day of school with her wearing her backpack.  We’ll see how long she lets me get away with that.  🙂

Check out this update for photos of the book in use!

I feel like I should have something awesome to put up on the blog today after phoning it in on Friday, but I have to be honest, I got nothing.  To be fair, we were out of town this weekend and Kate’s been sick since we got back.  I know what you’re thinking, enough with the excuses!  Hmm… ::frantically searches through apature library in search of something to be blogged::  Well, I have something of a teaser.  🙂

Here’s a little something that I’ve been working on.

With lots of delicious Prima flowers.

And glittery goodness.  I love me some glitter.  🙂

We don’t let Kate watch TV unless she’s sick aside from the occasional family movie night, but we do let her play with her the iPad.  🙂  Michael has found a lot of really cool apps for her, but this one takes the cake.  Basically, it has a list of words and she traces the letters to spell them.  What makes it really cool it this stylus thingy that we have that lets her mimic writing with a pencil.

      

The best part though, is that you can add your own words.  You take a picture, add a name, and then record yourself saying it.  So far, Kate has added “Kate”, “Mom”, “Dad”, “Ninja” (our vicious 9 pound toy poodle) and “Bitty” (her baby doll).

Y’all, I think my baby is teaching herself to spell.  We were at a wedding this weekend and I was telling someone that she wanted C-A-K-E.  Kate looked at her and said, “Yeah, I want cake!”  I’m not sure I’m ready for this!

So I got nothing crafty today.  I blame my friend Libby.  🙂  Instead of creating anything, I’ve been rereading this truly addictive young-adult-angsty-teen-vampire-romance series.  No, not Twilight (although it’s good too).  We’re hooked on Vampire Academy.  She was looking for something quick to read and I suggested she give it a try.  Now, I’ve probably read it 50 times already, but then she got all into it and we’ve been talking about it…  Yeah, I’m rereading it for the 51st time.  (Sadly, I don’t think that’s much of an exaggeration.)  And I still love it.  Sometimes you just need a creative break, know what I mean?

The other reason this is all Libby’s fault?  We had Libby (who, in addition to being Kate’s future mother-in-law,  is an *amazing* photographer) take some family pictures for us and she posted our pics this week.  When I’ve not been reading about star-crossed vampire lovers, I’ve been playing the slideshow over and over again.  In an endless loop. I am so in love with these pictures.  Go check them out.  🙂

I have a couple of projects in the works; hopefully I’ll get off my tush and finish some of them in the next few days so that I have some content for next week.  For now though, I’m going to start on the last Vampire Academy book.  Right after I watch my slideshow again.

Just so we don’t have a picture-less post, here’s a cute one I took of Kate at the park a few weeks ago.  I think it was the one cold day we’ve had all year.  Seriously y’all, it was 89* outside today.  ::sigh::

Here’s a fun page that I made recently.

Michael helped me draw a sun with SCAL and I cut it out in yellow.  I inked up all of the edges to give them some definition.

 

I cut these butterflies out from a sheet of  patterned paper and layered them.  I have a lot of pages like this  🙂

 

I have to be honest, when I heard of this I thought it sounded like pretty much the coolest thing ever.  I mean, hello!  Wine lollipops!

I gathered my ingredients: port wine, salt, corn syrup and sugar.  The irony of finding corn syrup in my pantry when we try so hard to eliminate it from our diet otherwise did not escape me.  Eh, Kate’s not going to be eating wine lollipops anyway.  🙂

The first step is to reduce to port.  That was easy enough.  🙂

Then you add in the corn syrup, salt and sugar

and cook it until it reaches a hard ball stage.  Now, I’ve made candy a gazillion few times in my life, but I don’t generally use a candy thermometer.  I was getting impatient at the length of time it was taking for the candy to reach the right temperature so I kept bumping up the dial on the stove.

Bad idea.

I decided to finish them anyway.  I can tell you that they have a lot of potential, but scorched they are disgusting!  Definitely a learning experience.

I ordered a bunch of washi tape (a certain awesome husband got me a gift certificate for Christmas) and I decided to get these egg mold too so that I would qualify for free shipping.  I am such a sucker for free shipping.  🙂  Kate’s actually a great eater by toddler standards, but she’s not a huge fan of meat and we worry a bit about her protein intake.  Enter the egg molds.

Step 1, make hard boiled eggs.  Run them under cold water until you can physically stand to peel them.  The hotter the better.

Then you put the egg in the mold a clip it closed.

Into an ice bath for 10 minutes.

And then they pop right out!

How cute are they!  Bonus?  Kate actually ate part of them.  🙂

 

I’ve never been a fan of yellow.  Actually, that’s an understatement.  For most of my life, I have *hated* yellow.  Totally irrational, I know.  Then I was FORCED to buy this yellow bee outfit for Kate.  Oh, my goodness how could I resist?!?  Then we went on a walk at sunset and I fell head over heels in love with yellow.

I wanted to scrap these pictures and I realized that I didn’t own a single piece of yellow paper.  I had a few flowers and scraps of ribbon that came in packs that I hadn’t given away yet, but it was not much let me tell you.  I have to confess, I went on a bit of a yellow shopping spree.  🙂

I inked the edges of lots of delicious yellow and black papers and layered them all up.

I used two sets of yellow letter stickers to spell my title.

A little bit of rick rack,

some prima flowers with a bit of bling,

and some ribbon and acrylic stickers thingies.

Yellow, I think I love you.  🙂

Yum!  This was an easy project for Kate to help me with.

I melted the chocolate in a glass measuring cup and dipped the pretzels partway in.  I didn’t fully submerge them because then I would have gotten chocolate all over my hands, yuck.

Kate loved putting the sprinkles on them after I dipped them.  They probably would have looked prettier if we had done regular pretzels instead of bunnies, but we like to do organic when we can.  Especially when we’re about to cover them in ultra-processed food-dye-filled chocolate.  🙂

We dipped some cookies too since we had chocolate left over.  Yum.

 

These were not helping me with the dieting!  Luckily, they were a hit at the parties and are all gone now.

I have to be honest here and admit that I was ridiculously excited about making Valentines for Kate.  Like, for serious.  I decided to make the heart crayons that are all over Pinterest right now. (Should I just rename my blog “The Pinterest Show”?  I feel like I used to have original ideas.  lol.)

First step is to cut up the crayons.  Incidentally, I *may* have ruined our plastic cutting board cutting up the crayons.  I’m going to go ahead and suggest that you not do that.  Maybe put down some waxed paper first?  Then put your crayons in a silicon heart mold.  I got mine at Ikea for cheap which is good because, once you use it for crayons, you can’t use it for anything else.

I went with 2 colors in each mold.  Kate liked to mix the colors up more and, in the end, I think her’s looked cooler.  Regardless, it required about 2 crayon’s worth of wax for each heart.

So it turns out that I waaaay underestimated the number of crayons I would need. Particularly since, in addition to our playgroup party, we ended up going to a Valentine’s Day party at the library which required us to bring 24 valentines.  I may have used all but one of my child’s crayons up in this little endeavor.  It’s cool.  She and I both love brand new crayons.  OK, maybe I’m projecting a little  🙂

You “cook” it at 230* for 15 minutes. Well, if you have a normal oven you do.  With my oven, you check them at 15 minutes and then cook them for another 15.  This is probably super obvious to everyone who isn’t me, but you should put the mold on a cookie sheet before you put in it the oven.  Just trust me on this one.  Let them cool for an hour or two and then pop them out.  Basically, you want them to set up but if you wait too long (say overnight) they fall apart as you pop them out.  Ask me how I know this.  Grr…  No worries though, just pop them back in the oven and they remelt.

Now on to the paper portion of our Valentines.  My super awesome hubby got me a Cricut and SCAL for Christmas a few years ago.   For those of you living in a cave (hi mom!) a Cricut is a computerized die cutting machine.  SCAL is a piece of software that allows you to hook your Cricut up to your computer thus circumventing the need to buy cartridges.  I <3 it.  I cut out some 36 just-shy-of 3 inch scalloped circles.

I stamped, “You color my world Love Kate” on them.  (That’s another Pinterest rip off by the way.)  Now, I’m not a big stamper, but I think they turned out ok.  I had to stamp it 3 times because I didn’t have enough of each letter to spell out everything, but it was fairly easy to line it up using the acrylic block.  Not to mention, they’re 2 year olds y’all.  How critical can they be?

Hmm…  The plan was to put the crayon in the center, but even so I think it needs a little something.

I’m always a fan of bling.  Especially heart shaped bling.  

Maybe a little ink around the edges?

Ah ha!  A gray mat and we’re in business.  By the way, this is one of the crayons that Kate made and it’s totally my fav.  I <3 rainbows.

I stuck some Echo Park paper on the back and called it good.

I can’t wait for her to give them to her little friends at our party today!  🙂