Valentine's Day Cards

I warn you in advance that this is going to be an entry where I gush about how proud I am of Crafty Kid. Everything you see in this entry she made herself, from start to finish, with no help from any adults. 

I was out all day yesterday and came back to find these beautiful cards and a wonderfully laid out crafting work area. Talk about being impressed! She even had my 13-year-old stepson helping her because she showed him how to use the Cuttlebug embosser and he loved it. If that isn't enough, today I showed her how to use Photo Grid and she made the collage image you see above for the blog :)

As you can see she had her crafting area laid out nicely. The biggest problems any crafter faces is the issue of time and space. Nobody wants to waste a lot of time setting things out or cleaning them up. Or waste even more time digging through things to find what they need. And most people have to use their kitchen table (like we do) and so you have a limited work space. I taught her to create work stations for the cards so that she knows where everything is and can easily go from one step to the next. 

She set up the following stations: Paper, Cutting, Embossing, Gluing, Embellishments, and Stamping. Everything was laid out on the kitchen table lining the perimeter, like a horseshoe, and she worked off of the clear space in the center.

Obviously taking time to set up was not her favorite thing in the beginning. She just wanted to get right down to crafting, and this always left a big mess. Scissors lost under paper, embellishments on the floor, no table space when you needed to emboss. Of course that lead to frustration, and let's face it, at 11 you kind of just give up on it at that point. I was then stuck cleaning up everything to make sure it got back in it's place, which could take up to 30 minutes. (Again, goes back to knowing where things are so you don't waste time digging through everything.)

So this breakthrough she had is a big win for everyone! She's productive and happy making the cards, and it took me all of 5 minutes to get everything back where it belonged the next day.

As far as card design, it was her idea to buy the doilies a few months back. Look at how creative she was with using them! I was also super impressed that she mixed and matched so many techniques. (Layering paper & doilies, stamping, embellishments, embossing, shape punching)

Making these cards takes time and patience. I'm proud of her for following through with her creativity and learning at the age of 11 how important it is to be organized.

Holiday Ornaments: Part 2

So the Holiday season has come and gone yet again. I may have been quiet on the blog the last few weeks, but we sure have been busy crafting, party planning, and decorating! I'll have lots to share in the coming weeks.

I figured it would be best to start with the second half of our ornament project. I had held back on blogging about them because the Disney themed ones were a gift for my family. Crafty Kid had a great time making these and I was glad I came up with the idea because they were easy to make as well. We really loved making the spiral paper ornament! It was a lot of fun to do and such a beautiful result.

For this craft you will need the following:

• Double sided scrapbooking tape
• Mickey scrapbooking paper (or character of your choice)
• Paper Slicer or sharp scissors
• Q-Tip or a pencil
• Styrofoam or Epson salt (if you want to add "snow")

The first round of ornaments Crafty Kid and I were having trouble deciding what looked best inside the ornament. Some of our issues were that in order to get bulkier items to stay we needed glue, which was difficult to use due to the small opening on the top of the ornament. The paper items often just fell on their side and again gluing them to the wall of the ornament was a bit of a process. Not to mention only one side of the paper had a print on it so if it flipped over it just looked like white paper.

We had some scrapbook paper with larger sized Disney character faces on it, and luckily before we went to use it I had a breakthrough. I realized we could glue two of the characters together so there was a design on both the front and the back. In the ornament above we cut out two of the Mickey faces and glued them together with double sided tape. Then we rounded off the edges with a small, sharp pair of scissors.

We then put the double sided Mickey paper inside the ornament. We were super happy to see it stood up inside the ornament. We had some packing styrofoam I saved, so we broke it into pieces to put inside the ornament to create a snow globe effect. Crafty Kid really LOVES her glitter glue so she put some drips of it on the outside of the ornament.

For the Minnie and Pluto ornaments above we followed the same initial steps. Once the Minnie paper was inside the ornament we used Epson salt as snow and Crafty Kid dotted the top with white glitter glue. For the Pluto ornament she decided she wanted to dot the entire ornament and leave just the Pluto paper inside.

This ornament above is hands down my favorite! We were messing around with some smaller strips of scrap paper and came up with the idea to spiral it. I showed Crafty Kid that she could use a Q-Tip to roll up the paper and she ran with it! We used a couple different shades of silver paper. I cut the thin strips and she rolled them up. Some we stuck inside at that length, others we cut to different lengths. It came out so pretty.

Note: We put some glitter and flat white gems inside. I don't think it's necessary. You can barely tell unless you look very closely at the bottom, which is where they sank to. That's the beauty of the paper is it's so light as a spiral it has a floating effect.

So as promised from my previous Holiday Ornaments: Part 1 blog, above is my melted snowman Pinterest fail. Mine, of course, is the one in the right hand corner. Honestly it doesn't look as bad as I remember, but it still wasn't as cute as what I saw on Pinterest. 

Just goes to show that not all craft projects are as easy to replicate as you think. That's why when I blog I do my best to go step by step. I hope it's helping those reading with some ideas and inspiring you to craft on!