Happy Valentines Day

Today the boys will be handing out handmade Valentines. They each did something different....Miles wanted to hand out lollipops, Liam heart shaped stones and Aidan these fun cell phones we made ( a sweet idea out of a Family Fun book). All in all, I helped make 88 Valentines. Phew! Glad that's over. The kids loved them, so that makes it all worth it.
Hoping you're all having a Happy Valentine's Day!
XOXO,
Kika

Happy Valentine's Day

This is coming to you late in the day, so here's to hoping you all had a wonderful Valentines day.

We here enjoyed our day. The boys were excited to hand out their Valentines. We made Valentines this year that included a pencil as cupids arrow. Aidan was pretty proud of them. Wish I could say they were all my idea, but they weren't. Truthfully I can't recall where I saw them, it may have been over at Make and Takes, or The Crafty Crow, as I love both of those crafty blog sites.





At home we enjoyed a nice dinner followed by some yummy cupcakes from one of our favorite cupcake bakeries. I made sure to get all their favorites, Aidan loves the coconut cupcake, Miles loves the raspberry vanilla, and of course Liam loves the fudge on fudge. We had fun and the boys were thrilled to show Mom and Dad all their valentines they received. All in all, a pretty good day.

Artful Thursdays: Buttons of Love, a Valentine Ornament

I've been inspired by Julie Collings and her wonderful blog the adventures of bluegirlxo and am ready to take on her Artful Thursdays challenge. She's come up with this fabulous idea to pick a project every Thursday, using the treasures we've collected and finally use them. As many artists, I've managed to hoard collect lots of treasures with art projects in mind but never find the time to do them. This challenge will force me to make the time and work on it while meeting one of my goals for 2010, which was to focus more time on creative self-expression. My dear hubby will be happy too, as this may lead to some de-cluttering that he is always hopeful for.


So let me present to you my first project with tutorial for Artful Thursdays,

Buttons of Love



List of supplies I started with:
1. an oval shaped paper mache ornament left over from a previous project
2. vintage sheet music, cardboard left over from some packaging, ivory cardstock
3. one of my many jars of buttons
4. star dust glitter
5. a tiny piece of satin pink ribbon and vintage trim
6. red ink pad
7. heart punch by marvy
8. silver pipe cleaner
9. foam square adhesives and craft glue

First step was to glue the sheet music to the thin cardboard then punchout a heart from it. Then I inked the heart with red ink.



I then applied glue to edges of heart and oval ornament and rolled it through the glitter.


I trimmed and glued a piece of lace trim to the top of the oval, sorted through my buttons (deciding on an ivory, pink, and red color pallette), glued buttons covering the front of the oval.



I printed out "LOVE" on the ivory cardstock, trimmed it into a strip, followed with a second strip a bit longer with "v" cut outs on each end. I inked both pieces in red, adhered "Love" to the strip with foam squares, making a small banner. I attached this banner to the heart using more foam squares to give the piece some dimension.



I made a small hole on each side of the ornament at inserted silver pipe cleaner to make the hanger.



I attached the heart to the buttons with foam adhesive, tied the pink satin ribbon in a bow on the pipe cleaner, heat treated the ends of the ribbon to keep from fraying and Whaaa Lhaaa! You now have a very cottage chic valentine ornament to spruce up some small corner of your home or a perfect gift for a friend.



You can find this one in my etsy shop.

Get Ready For Valentines Day

I've been working on some Valentine's Day projects including some cards for my Etsy shop.. Stop by an check it out. This is just a few of many more I still need to photograph.

As for the boys, I would really like to have them make valentines for their classmates. It might be a huge undertaking that I may end up regretting later..or it might just end up being a great rainy day activity. Of course I'll have to come up with something that guarantees some sort of success. That means something simple! I've see lots of great ideas out there to inspire me but still not quite sure what we'll be making. Liam did say he would like robots so at least I've got one theme to possibly build on. Stay tuned to see if we come up with some creative goody.