Wednesday, December 21, 2011

Christmas craftiness

One more post for tonight's blog burst...  I think it's okay to go ahead and post this since the grandparents who regularly read this blog have already received their Christmas present from Joshua, and the other, less tech-savvy grandparents will be getting theirs on Sunday.  :)

In a fit of craftiness on a rare weekend off, I decided to actually DO some of the many fun ideas I've pinned on Pinterest over the last year.  (Side bar: have you gotten hooked on Pinterest yet?  It's such a fun place to dream about the many fun ideas that I would, of course, perfectly execute, if I only had the time...)

The first project I took on was a fingerpainting canvas, adapted from the idea originally found here.  I got enough white letter stickers to spell out Joshua's name twice (the white blended in with the blank canvas, which I think helped prevent the wee maestro from getting distracted and trying to pick off the letters), then set up a little paint station for him.  This was his first time playing with paint, and I think at first he was very distressed at how messy his hands got.  I would dip them in the paint and try to show him how to smear it on the canvas, but he would immediately lift his hands up to me and complain until I wiped the paint off.  So the first try was a bit of a fail.

Then I gave him a paintbrush to play with, and all was right in his world.  :)  Of course, because he was sitting in his booster seat, and because I'd squeezed the paint onto plastic plates, he apparently thought I was giving him a new utensil to try eating a new snack... It's a good thing the paint is nontoxic!  But I eventually convinced him that paint =/= food, and we started getting somewhere with the project.




Once the paint set, I peeled off the letter stickers, and was pleasantly surprised at how the canvases turned out!


After the paint project, I tried to take Joshua out of his "smock" (a large t-shirt that I never wear), but he kept running back to it and asking for the shirt, so I relented and let him run around the house with it on for a while.  What an adorable little artist!




Then, later that weekend, I tried my hand at another Pinterest project.  Or perhaps I should say, I tried Joshua's hand at it...  ;)  We have a yearly tradition of choosing an ornament that somehow epitomizes the past year for our family.  You can find blog posts describing past years' ornaments here.  This year, we decided an ornament made by Joshua would be a fun addition to our family collection.  So I decided to try replicating this super-cute idea...


And, okay, by "replicate," I mean "copy exactly."  But look!  It's Joshua's hand!  And super-cute little snowmen!  He was very curious about just what exactly I was pressing his hand into, so he actually held still and just watched while I placed and pressed his hand.  Then after 24 hours for it to dry, I got to bust out our fine-point Sharpies and play artist myself for a bit.  And I'm really happy with our little homemade ornament -- the first of hopefully many homemade additions Joshua will make to our collection!

1 comment:

Glinda said...

Look at YOU, Ms. Thang! And Mr. Thang, for Joshua, too! Great projects.