Love Fortunes

Some little Valentine's Day goodies, inspired by a how-to at the Martha Stewart website. Basically, you make felt circles and glue a piece of floral wire down the center, with ribbon on top to cover the wire. After they dry, you can bend them into a cookie shape. Then add your own Valentine's message. Caedmon made the one pictured for his teacher and one for her assistant. I also whipped some up for Joel and the boys. Theirs have personalized messages, I mean fortunes. (Don't tell.) I bought the boxes from our local Chinese restaurant and used some paper from my stash for the tags. Of course I added lots of Hershey's kisses to make them extra sweet!  

$1.00 Tattoos

I don't buy my kids a lot of "stuff," but I recently bought these tattoos at Target for $1.00 (there were about a dozen in a pack). My kids think they totally rock and I have to agree. As long as they stay FAR away from real tattoos. . . although I could see the value of the heart with MOM written inside. What do you think? 

PlaceMats

I have been wanting to make placemats for a very long time - ones that would fit on our tiny table, and would show the boys how to set the tiny table properly. A little scaffolding goes a long way. My original thought was to make felt mats and use embroidery floss to outline the place setting. TOO MUCH WORK - so it never happened. Here is the easy alternative that finally hit me. I took this cute paper with a different pattern on each side (reversible!), cut it into rectangles and drew the place setting on each one with a colored pencil. Then I took them to the library and had them laminated. I used a dry erase marker to draw the scalloped edges and then cut them out. Finally, I took a hole punch to fancy 'em up a bit. Caedmon carefully placed each piece of silverware on the mats at dinnertime - he even made sure the knife blades faced the plates! Yay! May I say that I think these are fabulous? Because I do. I might be cheesy, but I'm OK with that. Oh, and the cost of these darlings. The paper - $1.00 on clearance. The laminating - $1.50. $2.50 divided by 4 equals 62.5 cents each. Double Yay!

Little GuiTarzan

Missing Strings? No Problem for this little jamming GuiTarzan. Seriously, if I had this kind of confidence, I might actually be on my way to the guitar playing future I dream of. 

More Pink!

We have started decorating for Valentine's Day, and I am totally diggin' it. I strung these bird lights from IKEA along our art wire. Inspired by this post, I wanted to create a flower garland. The boys dyed some white coffee filters with red watercolor paint and droppers. After they dried, I mixed them up with some brown filters and  strung them on cotton twine to create the garland.  Next, we glued pieces of tissue paper to hearts cut from overhead transparencies. We layered some heart doilies into our mix, and turned on the lights. Frilly, fun, PINK! I heart it. 

Love Shack

This is the igloo cake, which more closely resembled a turtle, in my opinion. But who cares, right? We decorated with shredded coconut and powdered sugar, for snow, of course. Added some pink m&m's, sprinkles and these lovely gingerbread hearts, which I bought after Christmas for 62 cents! No, they weren't stale; they were in a sealed bag. Joel dubbed it the "love shack." I tried to scrawl that in icing, but it looked really horrible. So, we cut it up and devoured half of it in one sitting. Even boys don't mind the pink when it's this yummy! 

Recycled Paper

I got a  little paper making factory for Christmas. The boys and I tried it out and it was pretty cool. . . but I think if I actually made paper often, I'd have to produce it in larger quantities. It was a lot of work to make two tiny pieces with this kit. You could do the same thing with an electric blender and a larger screen.  It's a simple process - rip up paper, soak it in warm water, blend it into pulp, smush it onto a screen, dry it out. We added flower seeds to ours (leftover from last spring) - so we can plant the paper. I think it'd be fun to make greeting cards that are plantable. As an aside, I actually got the boys some paper made from banana leaves and elephant POOP. I don't think we can beat that, because I am definitely not going to be putting any excrement into our paper.