Author: Raptor Mama

I’ve fallen behind, it’s true, but I’m not giving up! Here are days 14-16.

On the 14th we watched The Grinch. Kate never really gets to watch TV unless she’s sick so this was a huge treat for her. I used a transparency as a base and just made sure to have things on the back to cover the adhesive.

On the 15th we had our friends Will and Libby over to make cookies. The base for the main page is a Kate creation. I love including her sticker pages 🙂

 

I had so many cute pictures that I had to add a page.  It’s 2 4×6 collages adhered back to back.

On the 16th we met up with some friends at an indoor bounce house. Kate had a ball!  I included the wrist ID thing they gave her across the bottom.

My goal is to have another December Daily update ready for Monday. I guess I need to start editing some pictures!

I’m working on catching up on some December Daily stuff, but I wanted to post this craft before Christmas.  I helped the girls make handprint Christmas trees for Christmas. I know this will shock many of you, but I found this on Pinterest and knew I had to make it.  🙂

I made a few changes, namely turning the handprints upside down to look more like branches and adding some thumbprint ornaments.  Michael made this awesome stop-motion animation of us doing this project.  So fun!

It was pretty easy to do as far as projects go.  I got some canvases at Hobby Lobby to use as a base.  Sometimes it’s nice to paint on canvas, you know what I mean?  Kate loves it.  After it dried, we did some thumbprint ornaments.  Then Michael painted a trunk for us and I added a star.  Sadly I couldn’t find any glitter, but I think they turned out cute anyway.  🙂

 

We were out of town this weekend, but I promise to get back on the December Daily bandwagon soon.  There’s no shame in finishing this project in January!

Those of you who know me well know that I tend to obsess about my Christmas wrapping paper.  In fact, I have been known to take longer picking out the paper than the gifts, a fact which frustrates Michael to no end.  This year I thought I would take a different approach though.  We want Kate to feel involved in our gift giving this year and our goal is to make Christmas about giving *not* receiving.  Not sure how successful we’ll be given the fact that she’s 2 1/2, but we wanted to give it a shot.

Which brings us to the craft du jour, wrapping paper.  Michael has a huge roll of white butcher paper which seemed like it would be the perfect canvas for this project.  I rolled out enough paper to make an approximately 10′ x 10′ square and taped it to the floor.  By the way, that measurement is *totally* made up.  I am terrible at gestimating stuff like that.  🙂

Then I let Kate pick out some paint from my scrap stash.  Probably should have used the crayola washable stuff, but I wanted to give her some more choices.  She went with pink.  🙂  When I first plopped her down with the paint (in her apron and diaper) she asked me for a paint brush.  When I told her we weren’t using brushes today, but just to walk through the paint and make footprints on the paper she looked at me like I had 3 heads, but eventually she conceded and gave it a try.

Once she got past her aversion to getting messy, she was all over it.  She enjoyed doing handprints as well.  She wanted to stick her whole face in the paint at one point, but I put my foot down.

We ran out of pink at one point, but we were still having fun so I got out some green paint.  Ah, pink and green.  My favorite color combo.  🙂

 

 

I will say that I was very worried before we started that she and Ninja (out toy poodle) would get paint all over the floor but they were both great.  Kate did forget and step off the paper a few times, but I just wiped it right up with a wipe.  Might want to do this outside if you have carpet.

Kate definitely needed a bath afterwards, but we had a blast.  She turned to me while I was cleaning up and said, “Mama, I’m happy.”  ::melt::  Me too, honey, me too.  Now I just need to design some tags and we’ll be all set.

I really should have an awesome December Daily post today. I didn’t have to work *and* Kate took a killer nap. I even have cute pictures. What’s my excuse? A friend of mine started a craft blog and I got sucked in last night. There I was at 1:30 (AM) addressing my Christmas cards when I came across UncraftyMommy. There was nothing to be done but to drop everything and make this wreath. I even roped my friend Libby into helping when she came over for a playdate this morning.

Mine is not nearly as cute as the original, but it gets the job done. I didn’t bother setting up a tutorial since UncraftyMommy did a great job on hers.

Only changes I made were to paint the clothes pins with acrylic paint and to use fewer clothes pins. Both were changes of necessity. The weather here is gross so spray paint was not an option. Also, I’m super impatient so waiting for a clear day just wasn’t going to happen. As for the number of clothes pins, I bought the last package at Joanne’s. To make up for the circumference, I put 3 pony beads in between each clothes pin instead of 1.

I wasn’t able to make it a perfect circle, but the wonkiness is much improved by the addition of some cards. Hopefully there will be some more December Daily content tomorrow!

Simple pages today. We went to Abby’s preschool sing-a-long program. I cut out a few more trees from the same old scrap of patterned paper.

On the back I cut out a piece from the program.

Kate and I made apple chips.  Yum.

Busy day so I’m keeping it simple.

I’m back!  The girls were very intent on their morning sticker project (thank you Target!) so I worked on December Daily at the kitchen island.  Nice to have some group craft time.  🙂  First up, day 10.

On Saturday, I didn’t take very many pictures at all.  Here’s one of Kate playing in the backyard while Michael worked on cleaning up.  Santa told us to clean up the backyard before Christmas; I wonder what he has planned?  🙂  Michael and I went out on a fabulous date, but I deliberately chose not to bring the camera.  Sometimes you just need to be present in the moment, know what I mean?  It was glorious.

Since day 10 uses a transparency as a base, I thought I would show you what it looked like with day 11 in place as well.  Have I mentioned that I love transparencies?  Just a few times?  lol.

Here’s the back of day 10.  Just a piece of patterned paper to cover the back of the photo and a small journaling block.  The journaling block has Christmas trees on the back that you can see through on the other side.  <3

And then onto day 11!  We went to see the Zilker Tree.  I miss the Trail of Lights, but Kate was amazed at the tree.  Her whole face lit up as we walked towards it.

I had a lot of fun playing with the bokeh.  I considered correcting the color in these shots, but I kind of like that Kate has the color from the lights reflected in her face.  Something different.  That and when I tried to correct the white balance, it looked all wonky.  Let’s just go with it being a deliberate choice, m’kay? Thanks.  🙂

Love these.  🙂

We also decorated gingerbread houses with Kate’s cousins, so I added another page to get in some more pictures.  These are just simple collages taped back to back.  I added a fabric tag for a little somethin’ somethin’.

And there you have it!

 

I took last night off from December Daily.  I just wasn’t feeling inspired, know what I mean?  I’m sure I’ll get caught up today or tomorrow.  🙂

Fun at Safari Champ.

We had a fun crafty playdate this morning, but sadly I took almost no pictures. Eh.

Another simple page as I had to work tonight. Added a bit of washi tape and some letter stickers and called it good. 🙂

We went shopping that evening and almost finished our Christmas shopping. Exciting! We also bought Kate the Little People nativity set and it was a huge hit. So glad we got it. After Kate went to bed, Michael and I started in on the wrapping while we watched Dexter.

This is another super simple page. I actually tried to use a little journaling sticker that I have from a million years ago, but the ink got all smudgy so I just wrote directly on the background paper.

I just realized that I forgot to ink the edges of these pages. Fear not, I shall do it tomorrow. On that note, I am somewhat shocked, but very happy, that I have managed to keep up this far! I’m 1/3 of the way through y’all!