Angel Topper

Today we have been taking it pretty easy. I have gotten a cold that is kicking my butt lately. So we laid in bed for most of the morning and afternoon watching cartoons. Virginia wanted to do a craft and I hate saying no to crafts. So I found a super simple craft for today. A paper plate angel that I found on Mess For Less. 

I managed to find one paper plate left in our craft room. I hand drew the same angel shape from Mess for Less onto the top of the plate. Then I cut around the head and arms of the angel. I kept the plate flat for Virginia to be able to watercolor the angels dress. Of course she tired of watercoloring pretty quick. So she decided to cover the rest of the dress with glitter. Glitter has been her favorite craft supply lately. 

Next I let her draw the face onto the angel. Then we cut strings of yellow yarn for the hair of the angel. Once everything was dried I bent the plate around and taped the back. I think it would have been better to staple. Virginia has a small Christmas tree in her room that use to be Reiggins. We decided to put the angel on top of her Christmas tree. We still need to add a halo but we were missing a yellow pipe cleaner. I think I could have just painted our white pipe cleaner. But Virginia didn't like that idea. 

But best of all Virginia was able to do this craft pretty much all on her own. Giving me time to rest on the couch. 

Bell Angel

For Day 13 of Crafting to Christmas, ( yes we skipped a few days ), we decided to make a bell angel. This week we started to loosely use abc jesus loves me. This is a great free online homeschool curriculum for preschool ages. We are doing the two year curriculum week 15 and so far loving it.

I have been reading the baby jesus story from The Beginner's Bible for Toddlers. So the bell angel tied into the story. I reminded Virginia how the angel came and talked to Mary in the story telling her she was going to have a baby. 

I printed off the black and white version of the bell angel on card stock so Virginia could color in the angel. After she was finished coloring I cut out the angel. She helped me glue the pieces together. Next I took two loose bells that I had in my craft room. Using a hole punch and pipe cleaners I put the bells onto the bottom of the sleeves of the angel. I punched the hole and threaded the pipe cleaner though the bell. Then threaded the pipe cleaner though the hole of the bottom of the bell. I next just tied a knot on the back side of the angel keeping the bells some what in place. 

At the bottom of the bell is a space to write the child's name. I had created a dotted outline of Virginia's name on a scrap piece of card stock for her to practice writing her name. I loved the first try so I just cut it out and glued it to the bottom of the dress. 

After the angel was complete and all put together we used painters tape and taped it to Virginia's bedroom door. I really enjoyed this craft and it didn't take up to much time. 

Weekend Wrap Up!

This weekend was pretty much packed full of fun. Saturday Virginia and I went to our very first Lowe's Build and Grow Clinic. The project this week was to build a ginger bread house. For some reason I had it in my head that it was going to be more like a class with a instructor and everything. Boy was I wrong. We got there and signed in and there were tables set up down the back of the store. You picked your spot and then they laid down the project bag in front of you. Then everyone just went at it. The project bag had all the materials and instructions inside. Lowe's provided googles, hammer, and an apron for the kids. 

I assisted Virginia in hammering. Of course I helped her with reading the instructions which was a challenge in itself haha. It brought me back to the days of taking shop class in junior high and college. We had a blast and only had two oops on our project. The best part is she got a free apron and a badge for completing the project.

Sunday was the start of our hunt for a home church. I am super excited to find a church that is a good fit for my family. Virginia was so excited to go and loved the music. After church I got to go and enjoy a panther's game with my dad and two older sisters. Luckily the panthers decided to win for once.

Monday we spent the day out and about with good friends. It was a great start to our week. Tuesday was jammed packed. Virginia had speech in the morning. Then after speech we got ready to go see Santa. This was a big deal since last year she didn't want anything to do with Santa. She was so shy and scared of him. But this year she was ready and actually sat on his lap and told him what she wanted for Christmas. Afterwards she played on the play ground in the mall and then we were off to dance.

At dance we were able to try on the recital costume today. All I can say is she was so cute. The kids had a small Christmas party after class. We had one more stop and then we headed home. It was a busy weekend which seems to be the norm for us doing the holiday season.

Hopefully we will be back to doing some crafts this week and I will post pictures of our crafts.

Day 7 of Crafting to Christmas

On Day 7 of Crafting to Christmas we took it pretty easy. We spent most of the day out shopping with friends. Once we got home we ordered pizza for dinner and enjoyed watching Cinderella and Doc McStuffins Holiday special. After that we just pretty much laid around relaxing. Me surfing the internet between my favorite sites and Virginia playing on the Ipad. Before I knew it it was time for Virginia to head to bed.

About a few minutes before time for me to go to bed I thought of a great idea. Virginia has been really enjoying a few memory games on the Ipad. So I thought how much fun would it be to make her a Christmas memory game. So I did a quick search on Pinterest and found a perfect set from Modern Homemakers. I love the illustrations and how they are simple and images that Virginia can relate too. I printed the printables out real quick that were provided. I quickly realized my ink is low, BOO!

But they printed just not at the best quality. So I plan to still play with Virginia tomorrow morning. But I plan to print the sheets again once I replace the ink. Then run them though my laminating machine so they will hold up better and we can enjoy them again next year.

Update: So we played this morning and she loved the set. It only took me a few minutes to cut the cards out and I let her lay them face down in rows. Virginia was very excited that she beat me the first round. I believe she has inherited just a little bit of the Ford competitive side. 

Day 6 of Crafting to Christmas

For Day 6 of Crafting to Christmas I decided to pick a craft that would help kick off the Christmas decorating of our house. Yeah we are a little late on getting the Christmas decorating going around the house. Virginia has been asking every day when we are going to decorate. Our neighborhood this year has tons of houses that have fully decorated their houses on the outside for Christmas. Virginia says everyone is ready for Christmas mommy but us we need to get ready. I have to giggle a little every time she says this.

So as I was surfing Pinterest today for a craft to do I came across Centsational Girl's blog. It happened to be a two year old post of hers actually on December 6th about holiday crafting. She had a bunch of good ideas and I fell in love with her Merry sign she had her kids paint. She used craft letters she brought at a store. But I decided to try to use things I already had in the house. 

I pulled out the cardboard I have filling my craft closet and hand drawn each letter. Now if you want to have a little more neat letters I would suggest printing out a template. I didn't care to mess with a template so I just winged it. Once I got one letter cut out I gave it to Virginia to paint.

She used regular acrylic paint and painted both sides red. Once I had all the letters cut and painted, we let them dry for a bit. Once dry I brushed on glue and let Virginia go to town putting glitter on each letter. I use a dollar store cookie tray to try to contain the mess. It helps, but don't get me wrong you will end up with glitter on the floor and such but that is just part of the fun. The nice thing about the cookie tray also is it will catch the extra glitter. I just use a zip lock bag and go outside and put the excess glitter into the bag to use again on another project. 

Once every letter had glitter and was looking nice. I took some fabric I had laying around and cut strips out to hang the letters over the mantel in my house. I used my hot glue gun to attach the fabric to the letters. I used painters tape to tape the fabric to my mantel. 

The cutting the letters out was the most time consuming part of the whole project. After that everything went fairly quick. And in the end I had myself a nice decoration for the mantel. 

Day 5 of Crafting to Christmas

For Day 5 of Crafting to Christmas we took our crafting down to MawMaw's house.  Virginia picked out Jingle Bell Sticks as the craft to do today. So we gathered our supplies which thankfully was a small list.

Supplies needed:

• Paper towel roll or toilet paper roll
• christmas wrapping paper or some other pretty paper
• tape
• hole puncher
• jingle bells
• pipe cleaner

We used paper towel rolls for the tube. All you have to do is wrap the christmas wrapping paper around the tube and tape it down. Next use the hole puncher and punch holes along the top and bottom of the roll. Then use the pipe cleaner and thread the bells onto the cleaner and though the holes on the paper towel role. After that you got yourself a jingle bell stick. 

Virginia and Samantha loved them and quickly went upstairs with MawMaw to put on a jingle stick parade it was super cute. Even baby Zach got in on the action and grabbed the jingle bells bag and started shaking. 

Day 4 of Crafting to Christmas

For Day 4 of Crafting to Christmas we decided to make a few more ornaments. I came across this great recipe for the quickest salt dough recipe ever on Rainy Day Mum. The recipe we used last year I wasn't a fan of. The ornaments took forever to dry and become hard. But this recipe is awesome and only calls for three ingredients. 

Another plus is that the dough dries in the microwave in less then three minutes. But be WARNED: Watch the dough when its in the microwave because it will burn if your not careful. I found that smaller pieces can take like 30 seconds and the larger pieces take like three minutes. Just depends on how strong your microwave is. 

We used Christmas cookie cutters and some cutters from Virginia's play doh collection to cut out the shapes. I did forget to punch holes at the top to hang in the ornaments. But I figure I will just hot glue string to the back to hang them on our tree. I had Virginia paint the dough with acrylic paint and afterwards I covered them with Mod Podge. I love how quick the recipe was and how easy the dough was to roll out and work with. We definitely will be using this recipe again.

Day 3 of Crafting to Christmas

Sorry for the late blog post. But ran out of time last night before I had to go into work.  On Day 3 of Crafting for Christmas we made christmas ornaments out of popsicle sticks. My parent's Christmas tree is pretty much covered in ornaments that my mom painted when she was pregnant with my older sister Lisa and with ornaments that me and my sisters made growing up. I knew I wanted the same for our tree. 

So this Christmas we decided to make a few homemade Christmas ornaments. I found these popsicle ornaments over at Little Family Fun. I already had all the supplies in my craft collection. 

The supplies I used was:

• Popsicle sticks
• Paint
• hot glue gun
• buttons
• beads
• glitter
• paint brushes
• paper plates

I started off with Virginia coloring the popsicle sticks green for a Christmas tree. I realized very quickly that this would take awhile. So I changed my mind and just let her paint the sticks. I jumped in and helped her also. I laid the sticks on paper plates and we painted away. We used washable paint at first, but then I decided to grab the acrylic paint. We painted green for the christmas tree, blue for the snowflake, and yellow for a start.

We set them all off to the side to dry for a bit. Once they were dried I grabbed my glue gun and looked at the pictures on Little Family Fun on how to construct each shape. For the Christmas tree I used my scissors to cut the sticks down to the shape of a tree. Then just glued the sticks together. Some process for the snowflake and star. 

After the shapes were made I went and grabbed my collection of jewelry beads. I let Virginia pick out what to use to decorate the ornaments. For the Christmas tree she used beads and buttons. For the snowflake and star she decided on glitter. We actually used some old bracelets that I had made in the past for the hangers for the ornaments. They worked perfect, I just hot glued them to the back of the ornaments. 

Now we just need to go pick out our Christmas tree and we will be ready to add our ornaments. 

Day 2 of Crafting to Christmas

On day 2 of Crafting to Christmas Virginia decided to decorate the back of her christmas ball with tissue paper, construction paper, foam, and of course glitter. The girl is all about some glitter lately. I had planned to make ballerina snowflakes today, but Virginia decided to put that off for another day.

Today she wanted to make home made Christmas cards. I got the idea from Dily-Dali Art blog. We used plain printing paper and I let Virginia stamp her finger onto our rainbow stamp pad. Next she stamped the paper. We used glitter glue for the wire and made the card look like christmas lights. Then we wrote Merry Christmas in the middle. Next I pulled out my laminating machine and decided to test if it would laminate fabric. I cut out the card and laid it on the fabric and ran it though the laminating machine. 

The fabric went though the laminating machine just fine. But next time I believe I will use card stock for the paper. And the glitter glue was not the best idea to use for the wire of the christmas lights. Once though the laminating machine the glitter glue kind of disappeared or just got moved around the card. So next time we will just use a pen. Same for the Merry Christmas I believe I will write with a pen or color pencil for round two. 

We got a late start today on our cards so we only got half way though the start of the second Christmas card. We plan to finish the second card up in the morning. So watch for the final picture of card two tomorrow. And the second version of the christmas card will also be shown tomorrow as well. Virginia is loving the Crafting to Christmas. Each morning she is waking up and asking me what craft we are doing today. I believe this may be a nice tradition to add each year.

Countdown to Christmas

Every year I see all these amazing homemade advent calendars. And every year I tell myself I am going to pick one to make for next year. Well this year I finally got my butt into gear and made one. I have decided that each day leading up to Christmas Virginia and I are going to do one craft each day.

I meant to make the advent calendar on Friday but got busy and let it slip til Saturday. No big deal right, it got done just in time. What I love most is that everything I used I already had in my craft supply. 

The supplies I used was:

• Yarn
• construction paper
• scissors
• Glue
• watercolor paints
• scraps of foam
• tissue paper
• markers
• crayons
• glitter
• painters tape

I used a glass to trace the shapes of ball ornaments. I used different color construction paper for each ball. We cut out 25 balls to represent the days leading to Christmas. Between the balls we decided to have Christmas lights. I just free handed a Christmas light shape. Cut those out of construction paper and then applied Elmer's glue to the bottom part and let Virginia add the glitter.

So next up I grabbed my yarn and pulled a long piece of string out. I arranged it christmas light / ball ornament / christmas light all the way til day 25. I stapled the christmas lights to the string to begin with.  I went into our craft room / play room and picked out the perfect spot on the wall for our advent calendar. I used painters tape to hang the string on the wall. Painters tape is my new love.  I can put anything on the wall and not worry about damaging the wall. Virginia loves hanging out artwork where ever she wants in her room, the play room, and even the master bedroom. 

Once I had the yarn taped up to the wall. I realized I really didn't need to staple the christmas lights to the yarn. I should have just used the painters tape and taped the christmas lights to the yarn onto the wall. That is what I did with the ornament balls just used painters tape and stuck it to the yarn onto the wall. IT was alot quicker then trying to staple. 

I decided that each day I will take down a ball ornament and let Virginia decorate the back anyway she wishes and then I will tape it back onto the yarn onto the wall. Along with that I have a holiday craft list that I am going to pick from for us to have a craft to do each day leading up to christmas. I figured this would be a nice way to countdown Christmas. So keep an eye on our blog and I will share each day what craft Virginia and I decide to do.