RaptorMama

It’s been too pretty to stay inside, so we set up the water table today.  Kate even got a bit of ice cream after dinner.  With sprinkles, of course.  🙂

 

My friend Kate sent us these awesome tongs for our Kate.  (Thanks!)  I gave her a muffin tin, the bowl of pony beads and the tongs and she went to town.

She insisted on only sorting the pink beads.  🙂

I love this activity.  Using the tongs helps develop her fine motor skills and sorting is always good for the ol’ brain.  We’ll be doing this again soon I think.

We got Kate a few pony beads and some pipe cleaners this week.

   

It was a hit! She had a blast threading the beads on the pipe cleaners.  She’s been threading wooden beads on shoelaces for a long time now, but it was nice to change it up with the pipe cleaners.  The stiffness of the pipe cleaners made it really easy for her to work with.

The fact that they were sparkly didn’t hurt.  🙂

   

We worked with her on making patterns for a bit, but as you can see she lost interest towards the end.  🙂

Michael and I went to a figure drawing class on Sunday night and it was awesome!  Instead of having a nude model, they had a burlesque dancer and instead of being in a stuffy studio, it was in a trendy East Austin bar.  ::love::  I felt a bit out of place amongst real artists, but I was content to sit in the back and scrapbook.  Due to the nature of the class, I brought almost no supplies.  Literally, photos, a 6×6 paper pack, paper trimmer, tape runner, ink pad, pen, cardstock and a few rolls of washi tape.  I’m not going to lie, it was a challenge to create pages with so few supplies, but I had a great time doing it.  Hopefully we’ll go again next month!

I had to cut out my own title, what with no thickers, stickers, or cricut, but it ended up just fine.

I was a bit worried about having only 6×6 patterned paper, but I was able to layer it in such a way that it spanned the whole page.  Of course I added some washi tape.  🙂

And here’s the full page.  A very different style and color scheme for me, but I love it.  I think I’ll experiment with limiting my supplies more often.  🙂

Kate requested a “Mommy Day” today, so we hung around the house and did some art projects.  She asked to scrapbook, be still my heart!

I dug out some paper scraps, some misprinted photos, stickers, glitter glue, markers, tape and scissors.  She was thrilled!

   

She was particularly fond of the tape.  That is, until she got it tangled up in her hair.  It’s extreme crafting!  We decided to go with a pony tail for the remainder of craft time.

I worked on Project Life while she created so that I wouldn’t a. interfere b. freak out about the mess.  She loved having tons of choices.  Usually I give her one thing at a time so this was a bit of a treat.  I’ll have to do it more often.

   

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  🙂