Author: Raptor Mama

I bought some organic potatoes the other day and they started to sprout.  Michael, the cook in our family, was a bit put out by this, but I thought it was kind of cool.  He suggested that I plant one with Kate so that she could watch it grow.  He even helpfully found these directions as he knows that I have a bit of a black thumb.  No really, I kill every plant I touch.  But I figured, how hard can it be?  It’s already sprouting.

First I gathered our supplies: potato, skewers, cup, water, scissors.

Then I cut the skewers down to size.  I know the directions called for toothpicks, but we like to improvise here.  Also, I have no toothpicks.  Kate was fascinated with the skewers.

Then I let Kate explore the potato.  Hey, it’s her science experiment, right?  I cut it short when she started trying to eat the raw potato.  A picky eater she is not.  🙂

Then I stuck in the skewers.  I decided to go with a nice star pattern.  (I sound like such a snob here.  I’m really not.  I am, however, a bit neurotic and OCD.  )

I decided to let Kate pour the water since she’s obsessed with pouring water.  Plus, I wanted her to feel like she was involved.  She loved it and would have happily poured the water back and forth for an hour if I had let her.  Then she got to help set the potato in the water.

Seems easy enough, right?  Wrong!  The black thumb strikes again.  We did this weeks ago, but our potato never sprouted.  It just dissolved.  There were trails of potato snot in the water.  I thought about changing the water, but Michael suggested that maybe the potato knew what it was doing and it needed the starch.  We waited and waited and waited until tonight we finally threw it away.  Maybe we’ll try again with a different type of potato because Kate thought that it was pretty cool to check on our potato every day, but she (and I) lost interest when nothing every happened.  Has anyone successfully done this?  Care to share any tips?

I completed 15 layouts on Friday and Saturday, many of them 2 pagers.  None of them anything spectacular.  They were all just blah throw down layouts.  While I was at my crop on Saturday there were some ladies there who were passionate about their scrapping.  They had come from all over Texas and they were obsessed with Tim Holtz.  Now that’s not really my style, but their stuff was amazing and it reminded me of how much fun I used to have scrapping.  When I would get *maybe* one layout done a week, not 15 in 2 days.   When I used to spend hours adding layers of fun goodies, not just slapping some pictures on some cardstock and calling it a day.  I was inspired.

Today, I got one layout done.  It was only a one pager.  I spent hours on it.  I love it.  Now it is far from perfect, but I felt like I finally got to play again!  I’ve decided that I can’t keep on at the pace that I was.  Good lord, I have something like 19 layouts slated for January alone.  I’ve decided that I am going to be much more selective about the layouts that I choose to scrap- as Michael says, I don’t need to make a page every time Kate goes to the park.

Without further ado, let me take you through the 16th layout.

First I trimmed the photos slightly, maybe 1/8th of an inch off of each side?  Then I matted 3 of the photos very thinly with some patterned paper before I busted out the big guns, the hubby’s sewing machine.  I have had several scrapping buddies who are intimidated by the thought of sewing on paper and I just don’t get it.  Of course, I learned to sew on paper way before I learned to sew fabric so maybe I’m biased, but I think paper is easier.  It doesn’t bunch or shift and you can glue it together instead of messing with pins.  I didn’t even change the bobbin.  🙂  Don’t put glue right where you’re going to sew though.  It tends to gunk things up.  For these pics, I sewed a slightly crocked line around the edge 3 times.

Then I decided to ink the edges of the paper, because, hey why not?  I got nothing but time here.  This was right about the point that Kate woke up from her nap and I realized that I had basically gotten nothing done during her whole nap except for matting 3 pictures.  It was fun though!  I went ahead and slapped those 3 pictures down while Michael was getting her up.  Have I mentioned lately that he’s awesome?  🙂

Now what to do with the one remaining picture…  I decided to frame it with some of the die cut ribbon tape stuff that came with the patterned paper I was using.  It’s kind of a pain to use, but it sure is cute.  It wasn’t really popping against the paper though so I outlined it with a brown marker after I had it down to give it more definition.

Then I decided to use some of my stash of chipboard glitter letters.  Of course, I only had 1 of the 4 letters that I needed, but I’m not one to let that stop me.  I just cut up an “h” to make an “l,” a “g” to make an “o” and an “a” to make an “e.”  The “e” doesn’t look perfect, but I’m going with it anyway.  I went ahead and outlined these too.

I also made a little tag to slip behing one of the photos to add some journaling.  Not that it needed to be hidden, but it didn’t fit on the page anywhere.  Then I threw on some rubbons and a bottle cap.  Speaking of, who knew bottle caps were back in style?  Not me, but I saw them out at Archivers this weekend.  Lucky for me I never throw anything away and I still have several from the last time they were popular.  I had even already flattened and painted this one.  🙂

Here the finished layout!  I decided to get all artistic with the background.  Well, that and the fact that it was rapidly getting dark and I wanted to take these photos with natural light.

Here’s a close up of some of the details.

Questions about any of the supplies?  Leave a comment and I’ll try to dig out the packaging.

 

 

 

I’ve been falling behind in Kate’s scrapbook for a while, but I am determined to catch up.  I finally finished Year 2 Volume 1 (which was the 6 months ending in December) and it feels great to move on to her current book.  I was scrapbooking last night and I’m already forgetting the details that I wanted to include with the journaling, so I’m determined to catch back up so that I’m working on more current layouts.  I’m also toying with the idea of prewritting the journaling and including it with the pictures until I’m ready to scrap the layout.  Maybe I’ll do a combo of both.

I did just order a ton of pictures.  Like 251.  And that’s only the pictures from February and March.  Hmm…  I might need to cut back on the number of layouts I’m scrapping in the future.  🙂  This did include the pictures from our cruise in February though.  I’m trying to decide if I should include the pictures in with Kate’s scrapbook or just make a mini-book…

I used to order from Shutterfly, but the pictures always came out a bit dark.  Don’t get me wrong, their photobooks are amazing, but for regular prints I was less than thrilled.  So I switched over to Picture Preview on the recommendation of a friend.  Wow.  I love them.  Super fast, awesome prints.  Their upload interface leaves a bit to be desired, but the print quality is great.  And super fast.

Oh my, I have got my work cut out for me.  I did get four layouts done last night though, and I’m going to a crop this Saturday.  🙂

I have been wanting to dye some rainbow rice ever since I saw this come across my google reader.  I decided to go ahead and make a plain rice sensory tub first though.  That way when I dye the rice later it will be all new and shiny.  More bang for my buck.  Yee haw.

Eventually I plan to put all of the rice in a rubbermaid box about the size of a shoe box.  Of course first I need to find said box in the pit that is my half of the office.  Hmm…  that might take a while.  I was tired of waiting though, so I decided just to use a pot.  It worked great.  I’ve been collecting some random treasures for a while with this sensory tub in mind.  The idea was that Kate could dig around in the rice and find them.

This was fun for a while, but then Kate noticed that I had put the pot on a cookie sheet to try and minimize rice spillage.  Kate took this as an invitation to transfer the rice to the cookie sheet.  Not quite what I had in mind little one.  Right about this time, I vaguely remembered some Montessori lesson about moving rice with spoons.  Of course, maybe I was making it up, who knows.  At any rate, I went with it and dug out some bowls and spoons.  Raptor approved!

She particularly liked scooping the rice up with the spoon and putting in the bowl.  Once the bowl was full she poured it back in the pot.  This seemed to be a natural extension of her obsession with pouring water back and forth.

After a while she decided to put the tiny animals in the bowl and give them a rice blanket because they needed to go to bed.  Adorable.  It was slightly less adorable when she decided that she simply had to pour the whole pot of rice out on the cookie sheet.  What can I say, at least she didn’t pour it on the floor.  Still, I think that this might be an outside activity from now on.  🙂

 

I’m afraid that the Raptor is down for the count.  She’s been sporting a fever since Saturday afternoon but we have an appointment this afternoon to figure out what’s going on.  Consequently, I have no blog post ready for today, but I can give ya a cute picture from Friday.

Enjoy!

Oh my.  For some reason, unbeknownst to me, I decided that it would be a good idea to dye Easter eggs.  With Kate and the 2 girls I sometimes babysit.  Welcome to crazy town.  🙂

First of all, if you’re planning to dye eggs, I recommend buying the cheap white eggs, not organic brown eggs.  Mistake number one.  I decided to forge ahead anyway.  Nothing could make me return to the train wreck that is HEB until I absolutely had to.  Like say, we run out of diet coke.  Or wine.

I found this great idea on Pinterest (which I am totally addicted to by the way) to put the dye in a muffin tin.  We’ll go ahead and call that mistake number two.

I’m getting ahead of myself though.  First I cut each of the dye tabs in half so that I could split the dye between 2 sets of muffin tins for the 2 big girls.  I was feeling so optimistic a this point.  ::sigh::

I decided to put stickers to spell out the girls’ names on the eggs.  The plan was to remove the stickers after the eggs sat in the dye bath.  As you can see, Kate is more than ready to get this show on the road.

Michael decided to try a crayon resist.  Probably would have been a good idea not to use washable crayons.  It did work as a resist, but all of the color was leached out.  We’ll call that mistake number 3.

Turns out that the crayon color disappearing was just the beginning.  I was trying to dry the egg and the dye started rubbing off.  OK, at this point it was just getting comical.  What are we up to at the point, 4, 5?

Hmm…  I’m just going to go with “shabby chic”.  🙂  Kate just could not help herself, she had to bang the eggs on the table.  It was pretty funny.

Kate’s name egg turned out the best because it was in the darkest dye bath, but I think they all turned out pretty cute.  Bottom line: we had a lot of fun, but we’re not going to be winning any egg decorating contests.  🙂

I am so loving Project Life!  It has evolved a bit in the 2 weeks I’ve been working on it.  I’m still doing a picture a day, but I’ve decided to take all of the pictures with the hipstomatic app on my iPhone.  This way I don’t have a lot of pressure to carry the hubby’s DSLR around everywhere trying to make sure that I get a perfect picture every day.  Of course, in reality the camera does go most places with me, but the phones go everywhere.  It makes it much easier to snap a quick photo of everyday stuff.  I also decided that Kate does not need another scrapbook!  She has a several *very* full scrapbooks of her own, plus a blog.  Project Life is becoming more about *my* story.  Obviously Kate still makes regular appearances.  🙂

The hipstomatic prints are 4X4, but since we print them out at home they come out 4X6.  The first step is to trim them down to 4X4.  Since they are 4X4 and the kit is designed for 4×6 I back them with patterned paper.  This also gives me the opportunity to squeeze in some more pictures.

Here I have 3 pictures in the space for 2.  I did have to cut one in half but, as we’ve discussed before, that doesn’t bother me.

Here’s another one where I cut a picture in half.  It was at about this point that Michael suggested I change the name to Project Lush.  What can I say, I enjoy an adult beverage now and then.  🙂

Another option to include more photos is to put them in the extra journaling pockets.  Each week has 8 spots for journaling cards but seeing as how there are only 7 days in the week you have an extra one.  The kit includes little accent cards to put in them, but I decided to put a picture in this one instead.

Since we’re Michael’s printing them out at home, I try not to harass him too much about it.  What I do instead is make sure I’ve taken the picture for the day and then I put a sticky note where it will go once it’s printed.

I try to go ahead and get the journaling done as I go too.  If I was doing 4X6 prints, I could then just slip them in whenever I finally had them printed.  I spend a bit more time mounting them on patterned paper since I’m using 4X4 prints, but it still doesn’t take long.  Loving this whole concept!

I am addicted to bows.  Particularly bows from Gymboree.  I love them in all their corkscrew glory.  The only problem is that they have barrettes and Kate doesn’t have quite enough hair for them.  No worries.  I just convert them over to alligator clips.

First I use this random tool that Michael found for me out in the garage.

I use it to cut away the plastic barrette part.  You have to be careful while you’re cutting away the pastic that you don’t cut through the ribbon or any of the thread connecting the ribbons.  You have to kind of scootch the ribbon to the side, cut away one side and then scootch it back over to cut out the other side.

Then you have to work the piece of plastic around until you can get it out.  Finally you are left with only the ribbons which should have a small piece of ribbon holding them together.

Thread a piece of ribbon through the loop and then slide your alligator clip through it.

Next you just put some glue on the ribbon and fold it over.  I use felt glue, but I’m sure you could use pretty much anything.  The ribbon will glue to itself through the holes in the alligator clip.

Then you do the other side.

I think the ribbon gives the bow a nice finished look, plus it seems to help grip Kate’s fine baby hair.  And here’s the finished bow!

Too bad I ran out of alligator clips before I could do the second bow.  Raptor was not pleased when she only got to wear one bow.  She kept demanding “Two!  Two!”  Guess we’ll be making a trip over to Sally’s in the near future to buy some more.  🙂

 

 

The Raptor has been absolutely fascinated with water lately.  I swear she spent an hour earlier this week pouring water from one cup to another in her water table.  So today, Michael took her out to water the trees.

Hmm…  I use the phrase “water the trees” loosely.  Mainly she wanted to make mud.  Oh well.  This tree isn’t looking so good anyway.  I think I have a green gangrene thumb.  After a very cursory watering, Kate moved on to the mud making portion of the evening.

And then on to the puddle splashing.  She had a blast!

I stumbled across this idea for a thumbprint hyacinth on Pinterest the other day and decided to give it a whirl.  It seemed easy enough.  Famous last words…  Nothing about precision finger painting is easy with a toddler.

First I drew the stem and leaves on with a green marker.  I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that you should go ahead and take the trouble to find one of your nice markers to do this.  Using whatever partially dried up old thing you find in your child’s art drawer is probably not going to cut it.  Oh well.

Then you dip your child’s thumb in purple paint and stamp it up and down the stem.  Huh.  Yeah, that probably works a lot better with an older kid.  It probably also works a lot better if you’re not trying to take pictures at the same time.  You know, I’m not even going to bore you with our final product.  Check out the example if you want to see how it should look.  Her’s looks awesome.  🙂  Incidentally, Michael wanted to know why I didn’t use blue paint for the bluebonnet.  Hmm…  Maybe we’ll try again next year, but make them bluebonnets instead of hyacinths.

Luckily, Kate and I are not ones to let something as trivial as a failed thumbprint craft get us down.  Especially not when we already have paint out!

Kate had a great time making handprints.  In fact, she demanded “Kate’s hand!  Kate’s hand!” until I finally acquiesced and covered her hand in paint so she could stamp it.  I really need to get some paint brushes to facilitate this.  Mommy is not a fan of getting her own hands covered in paint.