Star Wars Valentines Pinned and Did

These are the valentines I made for my oldest's class.  We used glow bracelets that are sold at Michaels for $1 for 10.  I found the font by googling "Star Wars fonts."  The pinspration was from this site.  I used a lego Starwars sticker rather than a scan of an actual lego.  Darth Vader's lightsaber is visible when you remove the glow stick.
After we made these, I found this Yoda design which I think is adorable.
Both of the links have the file to print out- just in time for Valentine's day!

Play Kitchen Remodel

brand spankin' new Christmas morning 08

We have a cute little play kitchen that our girls got from Santa a couple of years ago. The girls decided one day to try and play with some real water and kinda made a big mess of the press board "back splash." I didn't care too much about it until we ended up moving it into the basement before we put our house on the market. I was a little worried people might think there was some kind of basement water leak that had cause the water marks on this thing. I decided to tile the back splash with some sheets of 1" glass tiles. I got two 12X12" sheets at Home Depot for under $5 each. The girls picked out the color. We decided to go with tile that worked okay with the pastel colors (I may eventually remodel the play kitchen a bit more, but for now we're good). I decided to prime the back since it was gross looking, the tiles ended up being opaque so it didn't matter. I stuck the tiles on with spray adhesive. Then I just grouted over it with some non sanded grout from the craft store. I also gave the formerly red wire basket a coat of silver spray paint to coordinate a little better.

I got a little pouch of non sanded grout for under $2 on clearance at Michaels.
sorry for the weird angle!

~The finished product~

linked to

Reusable Vacation Countdown

For the unofficial start of summer (it sure feels like summer here today!) I've got a little project I made in my excitement for our upcoming trip to California.  I wanted to use things I had.  Check!  I wanted it to be small.  Check!  I also wanted it to be easy to put up out of the way as our house is still on the market.  Check!
 I got to thinking a little bit and decided it would be fun to use the little clothespins I bought at a craft store years ago.  One thing led to another and I ended up making a countdown that can be reconfigured and reused for a variety of purposes.

all of my materials except the scotch tape for wrapping the box

I started off with a small priority mailer from the post office.  We had a bunch in the basement from when we used to mail things more often.  Probably just about any small box would work, but the post office boxes are nice and sturdy.  After assembling it, I wrapped it up with some scrapbook paper.  I did a little trial and error to find a good size for the little folded pieces of paper.  I cut them about 1X2" long then folded them in half.  I found some string and wrapped it around the box several times and tied it off in the back.  If I hadn't packed all of my stamps away, I probably would have stamped the numbers directly on the papers, but printing off the little numbers and the title on the computer worked just as well.  Inside each folded paper is a little activity to help us get ready for our trip.  One is giving ourselves pedicures (I've got two little girls).  Another is picking out which toys to bring on the trip (very important!).  One is packing our suitcases (it will just seem more exciting this way and less of a chore right?  right?)
Since all of the little cards are just clothespinned on rather than glued down, it will be easy to reuse this countdown.  I'm so pleased with how it turned out I think I might just make one in Christmas colors for an advent calendar this year.

UPDATE: I'd recommend a little bit of tape on the back to keep the string in place as you use it, the strings have been sliding down a bit for me. 

linked to-


http://justagirlblog.com/

Looking Ahead- Christmas Closing Ceremonies

Day 23

Two years ago we started an end of Christmas tradition- Christmas Closing Ceremonies. It's like the olympic closing ceremonies, only it's for putting the Christmas stuff away. We have hot cocoa, we let the kids help us take the Christmas stuff down (and play with it a bit). We pack it all up and put it in the attic. It's become an exciting and fun thing because we hyped it up to the kids and had fun working together.

Oreo Truffles

Day 17

I first saw this recipe in Better Homes and Gardens magazine last year. I made some last year along with some other stuff for goodies to give away. This year I decided to specialize and just make these. It was easier, and I think people like these better than blah cookies, or caramel corn that got soft because it was wrapped up with baked goods.

I lost the recipe I'd cut out of the magazine, but I found another version online. This is the recipe I used slightly altered from the version I saw online.

1 bag of regular oreos

1 8oz brick of cream cheese, softened

1 12 oz bag of semi sweet chocolate chips

Crush oreos as finely as possible in a large ziploc bag. Pour most of the oreo crumbs into a mixing bowl. Keep about 1/2 to 3/4 cup in the bag (it depends on how much you want to sprinkle on the top at the end). Mix softened cream cheese into oreo crumbs until a doughlike substance forms. Roll the dough into about 48 one inch sized balls and place on wax paper or a cookie sheet. Melt the chocolate chips using your favorite method. Roll each ball in the chocolate with a spoon until coated. Scoop up and let excess chocolate drip off. Place on wax paper or cookie sheet and sprinkle with remaining oreo crumbs.

My three year old helped me quite a bit with this recipe. She helped me crush the cookies, roll out the balls, and she sprinkled them with the crumbs as I put the freshly coated ones down.

I put some in these two little ceramic Christmas tree dishes I bought on clearance at Michael's, wrapped them in plastic wrap, and stuck bows on top. My oldest gave these to her teacher and bus driver.

The rest got sent to my family and eaten by us.

Initial Ornaments or Stocking Tags

Day 16

A couple years ago I bought some stockings that are all pretty much the same (some red, some green). There used to be an eve

n number, but the year someone got sick Christmas morning meant losing the balance.

I haven't put people's names on them. Last year I made little paper tags for them but I don't know what happened to those. I decided to make something a little more permanent this year.

This was a fun project for the whole family to participate in. I got a package of red Crayola Modeling Clay. This is the clay that air dries. We rolled out the clay and using our alphabet cookie cutters, we each cut out our first initial. Then we used some plastic gem stickers I got from Oriental Trading Company for some other reason to add a little bling. The sticky of the sticker combined with pressing them into the clay has held them in tight. I used a toothpick to make a hole to tie them up with. We let them dry over night and then I turned them over and let them dry a bit more. When dry, they're kind of soft like foam. I thought it would be a good material for stocking tags since they would be within kid reach and handled quite a bit on Christmas.

I got the clay at Michaels with a coupon of course! They even had multipacks with different colors there. I bet you could make a lot of cute Christmas ornaments with the modeling clay.

Gift Idea- Family Photo Calendars

Day 15

For the past couple of years, I've made photo calendars for the members of our extended family. The first year, I had empty calendars from Stampin' Up. I had to stamp in all the dates, months, birthdays, and holidays. It took a while, but I started in May. I also had to glue in paper and pictures on the blank pages.

The past couple of years, I've used make your own calendars from Michaels. All I had to do with these ones is add pictures and birthdays.

I've considered using online sites like vista print or snapfish to make calendars but haven't yet. The upside to using an online calendar maker would be less pictures to get printed out, less adhesive to buy, and less time putting pictures in. The downside is less variety (if you give duplicate ones instead of making unique ones). I'd have to pay shipping, but I could ship it directly to the recipient.

As far as what kind of photos to use- I've always gone with pictures of the kids and cousins. A family reunion could be a great place to take calendar photos of everyone. Use people's photos on the month of their birthday. You could also ask members of your family to send you digital copies of photos they've taken. I've also included funny quotes from the kids and I've also had them draw pictures in them as well.

Recycled Crayons- Gift Idea

Day 13

I initially got this idea from a book of preschool arts and crafts ideas and I've seen it on a few blogs lately as well. Every blog post I've seen has started out with brand new crayons though! Brand new crayons! Don't you people have used crayons?! Seriously?!

...

This is how we made recycled star crayons.

First, the girls and I went through our big old container of crayons of every sort, taking all the broken ones out to use. Then we sorted them by color, testing the wrapperless ones on a sheet of scratch paper (to figure out the color if it wasn't obvious), and removing the wrappings from the others. I made a ziploc bag for each color and wrote the color on the outside. There were variations of each color and some crayons could have gone in more than one bag, so just use your best judgement. I liked them all to have a bit of variation.

I used a silicone cupcake pan I got at Michael's (with a 50% off coupon!) to make the new crayons. I've also made circles in a regular muffin tin before too. The kids helped me break up the bigger pieces and put them in the pan. I made each well a different color. You could also use multiple colors in each well to make rainbow crayons.

I preheated the oven to 350 and put the silicone pan on a cookie sheet (per the instructions it came with). I baked the crayons until they were mostly liquid, but with some crayon shapes left in the middle.

You could totally liquify them and mix them for a consistent color, but I like the variation. If you bake them too long, the wax kind of separates and they end up kind of two-toned.

Let the crayons cool completely and then pop them out and put them in a cute little package.

Along with the crayons, I'm giving some coloring pages made from pictures we took. You can also find lots of free coloring pages online.

Kid Safe Ornament Hangers

Day 2

I came up with this idea a couple of years ago when the kiddos were smaller. Instead of dangerous metal ornament hangers, use twist ties instead. I don't know that's is necessarily safer if a kid was to ingest one per se, but it's a lot harder to get an ornament off when you twist tie it onto the Christmas tree. At first I used whatever random twist ties we had around the kitchen junk drawer. Then I realized that the plethora of clear plastic covered twist ties that take forever to remove from your kids toys could be used instead (they're a bit nicer looking than the ones that come in boxes of trash bags or on bread). They're usually quite large too so you could cut them (all you need is a regular pair of scissors) and get a few from one twist tie.

Another option would be to use some pretty, thin ribbon

(you could get all fancy with coordinating colors or something). But that costs far more than free stuff you were probably going to throw out anyway.

My Kind of Sandbox

Kids love sandboxes. Sandboxes are big are big and messy (especially when there is no lid!) and they kill the grass they're sitting on top of.
When we first moved in to our house, we had a purple triceratops sandbox complete with sand, sand toys, and weird green stuff that the previous owners left behind. Our daughter liked it alot. All the other kids that visited liked it too. The lid was gone so it constantly got water in it- hence the green stuff. One day someone got so upset about water pooling in it when it rained (I guess we didn't get around to draining it quickly enough for their liking) that they dumped it completely upside down. Our backyard is open to the common area behind our house. The sand stayed around on the ground for a while and then eventually rejoined the earth, mixing with the dirt. The sand box ended up in a dumpster. Four years later, we now have two kids, the younger of which had never played in a real sand box. We visited the beach and she was in heaven. I kind of wanted to have a sandbox since she loved playing in sand so much. I didn't want another big sandbox taking up valuable real estate in our tiny backyard though.
Then it hit me! Make a small sandbox using a wide, shallow, lidded storage box! I already had a perfect storage box with lid. We already had some beach toys. All I needed was some sand. I bought two bags of play sand because I wasn't sure how much I'd need. If I had lifted it myself instead of letting the nice guy at the store do it, I would have known one was all it would take (I wanted the box to be portable!) For less than $4 I had a little sandbox. My husband, the smart guy he is, figured out that it would work well to put the sandbox on top of the little plastic outdoor table (another leftover from the previous owners) and have the girls sit on their little plastic Ikea chairs* (we've had them for a while, I don't remember how much they were, probably under $5 a piece). So it became a sand table. The girls love it!

*a quick search of Ikea's site and I couldn't find those chairs any more, maybe they will get some more (or similar) again later. You could probably find such chairs in a variety of stores actually.

DIY Color Wonder Pages

We like Crayola's Color Wonder coloring pages around here. We take them to church on Sundays to occupy the girls with their mess-free (almost always, if you're real talented you can get some of their color on you) coloring fun.
Right now we are limited to the coloring book options Crayola has for us. I wanted to try to make my own coloring pages using blank color wonder sheets. Here's what I did. I headed over to Michael's craft store with one of my 40% off coupons (you can sign up to get them on their website, they often print them out at the register with your receipt, or you can even bring in a competitor's coupon!) and I bought the pack of 30 blank color wonder pages.
I took the pages out of the book, found printable coloring pages online (ours came from lds.org for church coloring pages), and Bob helped me configure the printer to make them print out right. The CW pages are a little smaller than the standard 8.5X11" so we had to adjust for that and we also tried to optimize the picture size to fill the page as much as possible. Definitely print test copies first on scratch paper. We have a laser printer and it seemed to come out just fine. I'm not sure what a different type of printer/ink would do. The printing started to smear just a little bit today after a lot of repeated going over the lines with a marker but the lines were all still there. The pages were a hit with the girls though.

The Children's Place Outlet

I was at the Children's Place Outlet at the mall on Wednesday and got a huge bag full of colder weather clothes for 99cents a piece. There were mostly tops (holiday and plain) but I also saw (and bought some) pants, dresses, and sweaters. Warmer weather clothes were also on sale. On top of that, I also used my 15% off coupon the Children's Place sent me in the mail which is good through the 10th.

Kids Clothes

I like to buy clothes for my kids in advance, when they're on clearance at the end of a season. There are two important things you need to have a handle on to be able to do this effectively.

The first is that you need to have some idea of what size your child is going to be when that season comes around again. If your child is pretty average, you can go by the age/size. For example, one year from now a six month old might wear 18mo size clothes. Where this doesn't work so well is if your child is a lot smaller or larger than "average." It's difficult to tell before your child is born or even when they're small where they're going to fall when they're older but as time goes by you get better at it. One way to get around this pitfall is to buy clothes that could work in multiple seasons. Short sleeved shirts and pants of most kinds work year round. I really love pants that have adjustable elastic waists. My oldest is tall and skinny, so they have been a necessity to get pants that are long enough to not fall down. Those kind of pants can be adjusted as the kid grows so he or she can wear them longer. Sadly, they don't seem to make adjustable waist pants in infant sizes (at least I haven't found any until the toddler sizes, yet!)
I often buy certain items (like dresses and t-shirts) in a slightly larger size for my girls. Since they're on the skinny side, they can often wear them for more than one year. A red sleeveless Christmas dress with a santa-ish coat got worn for two Christmases as well as during the summer without the coat. The downside to doing this is it makes the outfit more worn out and if you're looking to have hand-me-downs for younger siblings it makes it a little harder.

The second thing you need to make buying kids clothes in advance work is some place and some way to keep the clothes organized. If you forget you have them (and it's really easy to do!) and go out and buy more stuff, you haven't saved any money. If you don't find them until your child has outgrown them, that is just a waste. I have seen in catalogs little tags you can buy to stick on a clothes rod to demarcate areas for different sized items. Some stores give you the hangers the clothes were on and they have little tabs that indicate the size (not always the correct one though!) I suppose you could even make your own way to indicate which clothes hung on a rod are which sizes. I don't hang up clothes that my kids aren't wearing because I don't have that much closet space. What I've done is group similar sized items in cardboard boxes. Diaper boxes work well! I write on the outside what size(s) are in that box so I can tell quickly what's inside. I divide up clothes in sizes that the kids is going to be wearing soon by season. I keep the boxes of clothes that are going to be worn soon in the closet. Clothes that aren't going to be worn for a while (and this would be mostly for hand me downs since I don't buy stuff for really, really far in advance) go some place more out of the way. I keep a basket in the closet to collect clothes as they are outgrown. When the basket starts to fill up, or when it's time to switch out clothes for a new season, I box up the out grown clothes. When I switch out clothes for a new season, I keep any items that may fit when the weather changes again with the box of items in that next size/season. I only have to do this a couple of times a year, but it is a very good thing to do before you go out shopping for more clothes. Knowing what you have makes it easy to see what if any items you still need. Having at least some clothes already for when the weather changes gives you some time to wait for sales on other items you might need.