Fourth of July Crafts

This week, we did a different patriotic craft or activity every day, and even did the last one at the river yesterday!

We started off by painting some fun fireworks on Monday.  Super easy instructions here.

On Tuesday, Marshall loved making this hand print and fingerprint flag.

He calls his hand prints "high fives" and I love it 😊

On Wednesday, we did a counting worksheet and some coloring pages.

On the worksheet, I told Marshall to write his name on top of this line. He took what I said way too literally. 😂😂

At the river yesterday, Marshall made a necklace out of dried pasta noodles that I dyed red and blue.  Although, Marshall didn't hesitate at all to tell me they were more green than blue. haha

Yes, Marshall. No matter how much blue dye I kept adding, they still had a greenish tint. 😂

Hope you all had a fun Fourth of July!

Book + Butterfly Craft

Last week was Marshall's first week home for the summer, and we've already had so much fun! I'd already been brainstorming some activities for us to do, and the Type A in me has printed out calendars of June, July and August, and for each week day, I've written down what activity we'll do that day.

Our very first activity was a craft to go along with The Very Hungry Caterpillar.  When I went to find this book in his room, I found the second book as well, so we had two books for this activity 😊 After reading both books, we made a coffee filter butterfly 🦋

Supplies needed:

• 2 coffee filters
• markers
• pipe cleaner (not pictured below)
• tape
• cookie sheet
• water dropped/syringe (I used one from Marshall's medicine stash)

Flatten out the coffee filters, lay one of top of the other and tape down to the cookie sheet.

Color any kind of design (random scribbles and a yellow "circle" worked out just fine 😂).

Use the dropped/syringe to soak the coffee filters and allow the colors to bleed. You could probably just slowly pour water over it, but the syringe was easy enough for Marshall to help me with.

Once the coffee filters were completely wet, I put our cookie sheet on the back deck in the sun so it could dry quicker.

 

Once dry, fold each of the filters accordion style.  

I forgot to take a picture of this in between step.

Once you've folded both filters, place one on top of the other (one end of each "accordion" should be touching). I sure hope that makes sense, haha.

Bend the pipe cleaner in half, and twist it around the middle of your coffee filters. Shape the ends to make the butterfly's antenna.

  Finally, spread out the coffee filters to make the butterfly's wings! This took me a couple minutes and some adjusting the pipe cleaner to get a shape that actually looked like wings.

Voila!

 

25 Days of Christmas: Day 23

On two of the Christmas trees we had at our house growing up (we had a lot of trees! :) I loved it!!), there were these sets of little heart ornaments that smelled of cinnamon and were decorated with lace.  On the tree in the den, the set of ornaments had a red felt background and red bow; on the tree in the living room, the ornaments had a light pink felt background and pink bow.  This way, each set matched the theme of its respective tree. 

Somehow, I managed to get one of each color to hang on my own tree in my room...and those ornaments have made their way with that tree to our house now!

Anyway, my mom had made these ornaments years ago, and I think several times I or we have said we should make some again.  As I was brainstorming ideas for this year's 25 Days of Christmas, Mom came up with the idea of finally making some of these ornaments! Today was the day!  I headed over, was greeted by Annie of course, and got set making some new ornaments (because really, you can never have too many ornaments.)

They're very easy to make...just take a little bit of time and patience!

Here's what you're going to need to make them:

Ingredients:

• 3/4 cup of ground cinnamon
• 1 tablespoon of Allspice
• 2 tablespoons of ground cloves
• 1 tablespoon of Nutmeg
• 1 cup of applesauce

Directions:

1. Mix together. Simple as that. haha. 

2. Roll out dough and cut out ornaments. We sprinkled cinnamon over the counter so the dough wouldn't stick. Flour would've turned the dough white.
 

Look closely at these pictures...it's a little hard to tell.

Mom is on the left; I'm on the right.

We ended up wearing the same shirts today! haha. Christmas presents from Abby last year!!

 

Loving how these turned out!!

 

3.  Let ornaments dry on a flat surface covered in wax paper for 4 to 5 days.

Also, be sure to poke a hole at the top of your ornament, so you'll have somewhere for the hook to go!

 

Merry Christmas Eve eve!!!!

25 Days of Christmas: Day 9

I am very excited about tonight's post!

When I first saw this idea on Pinterest over a year ago, I knew this was going to be something I had to do eventually. You see, I'm a very sentimental person, and I like to keep a lot of things. (BUT, I am getting a lot better about this....just believe me on that one.) I love to keep cards that I've received and I have just tons of cards! I have had our stack of Christmas cards we received last year sitting in a pile upstairs since last Christmas, waiting for me to actually do something with them.  Then, when I started brainstorming ideas for these 25 posts this Christmas, it was a perfect opportunity to actually follow through!

These card books are so perfect for keeping your cards nice and organized, and also displayed out for Christmas!  This craft doesn't take very long to do--I did it in about 20 minutes or so before bed tonight. haha.

The supplies you need are:

• Christmas color/patterened cardstock or scrapbook paper
• Letter and number stickers
• Double sided tape
• Binder Rings
• Three hole punch
• Your cards!

First, I made the cover for my book. I couldn't figure out how big I wanted to do it (I think the original website has it as a 5x7.).  I asked Matt his opinion and, as always, he comes to the best conclusion, and, it was the easiest thing to do.  I found our biggest card in the pile--this would be our last card.  I measured that, which ended up being 8x4.5 and that was the size I used for my cover.

After making the cover, I started hole punching away! It was fairly easy to punch through all of the cards, and to eye-ball whether or not they were centered over two of the punches.  I tried to not let my OCDness get the best of me on this part!  It doesn't need to be perfect!

Once all of the cards are punched, start putting them on the binder clips.  I used another suggestion from the original site and used one of our Christmas cards we sent out as the first card in the book, following the cover of course.  So, the first card is us wishing everyone warm wishes with pictures of us in Jamaica! haha.

Voila! I was very happy with how the cover turned out!  The candy-cane striped background was Matt's idea, so I will of course give him the credit on making it look even better!

Now, time for me to start working on our Bridal Shower and Wedding Cards! I've been wanting to do a book of those for quite a while now, so now that I'm in the swing of it, I think I'll try to get to it soon. Maybe over Winter Break??

Fall Favorites

For some reason, I have been looking forward to fall a lot this year!  I think it started around the time I made our wreath, and then Matt said we needed to start decorating for fall, and then his favorite, Halloween!

Ever since, I've been looking forward to all things Fall related!  Plus, I'm just really excited to have all of our own space to decorate! {I know he's dreading the day the Christmas decorations all come out, though. haha!}

To start of the week, and since we're officially a week into Fall, I thought I would share some of my favorite things about Fall!

Our Fall Wreath

It feels like I just shared my summer/wedding wreath with you all, but a couple weeks ago, we took that wreath down and replaced it with a new one!

Since yesterday was the official first day of fall, I figured it's now time to share with you the fall wreath I made!  I had this idea since the summer, so I couldn't wait to finally make it and hang it up! And we didn't wait two seconds to hang it up!

Once school starts, it feels like summer is really over {even though it isn't officially over yet}, so we started putting out some fall decorations, and this wreath was the first to go up! :)

The materials I bought were the wreath, a stem of fall leaves, twine, and a letter N.  All of these were at Michael's, and I was SO excited to find the N in the clearance section for just 49 cents! And, if you've been