I’ve got some exciting news. I have a new ebook available on iBooks for the iPad! Leave a comment below if you’d like to be randomly selected for a free copy. I’m hoping to have copies on the kindle & nook soon too. Woo hoo!!!

Click here to download the iBook app.

I think this one might be my favorite set of illos…

More babies should be dressed in black, don’t you think?

***Thanks for all your love and support friends! I’m closing the comments on this post and hope you lovelies who commented enjoy your free download!!!***

…but because I get to help throw BAY SHOWERS! Last fall was my sisters, the “Future/Space Travel/Renaissance/Descendant of Greatness” themed shower (you had to be there. Or know my sister…) Next week it’ll be a slightly more conventional “Puppies and Sports” themed. My baby shower philosophy is:
-Everyone wants to see the gifts
-But they don’t want to sit there for too long
-Give them good food
-And keep it under 2 hours
Keeping with that theme, in oh-so-humble opinion, Baby Shower Bingo is the perfect game. The guests are forced to pay attention to the gifts if they want to win the BIG PRIZE. And it doesn’t suck up any extra party time. Have I sold you on it yet? If so, here’s a print out you can use for the next Baby Shower Bingo game you host. This will print out on standard 8.5×11″ paper, just trim it in half.

Here’s a PDF in BLUE:
BabyShowerBingo

And Pink:
BabyShowerBingoGirlColors

Here’s what I came up with:

The one tip I might pass along to y’all that’s not included in the tutorial links above is that when you’re cutting your template out, make sure you keep the corner’s sharp. For example, don’t try to cut out the elephant tusks the same time you’re cutting out the head. Go back and cut them out after you’ve got the basic shape of the head already cut. Also, I may have fudged a little on the rooster feathers cause the ones there are so detailed. I’m not THAT much of a perfectionist.

And if you’d like a copy of the stencils I used, here tis (except for the bow-tie, which I just freehanded) (disclaimer – I did a google image search for “silhouettes of animals”, etc. It’s very helpful for this type of craft…)

My friend Ann asked if I’d do a painting for an auction she’s having to raise funds to fight Chron’s Disease. This is what I came up with. Lately I’m loving paintings of words and only words. And it’s not often I get to actually PAINT anymore, so it was fun to do! (And FAST. Bonus points for that…)

I did a few illustrations for a math book about kittens. SO FUN. The illustrations were for an oversize book, so they were pretty huge. It was a challenge to make an image that looked good close up AND far away.

I’ve done a bunch of little spots for workbooks lately too. I love these jobs. They’re fun and quick. And when I say little, I mean LITTLE. This is the full size image:

And I got to work with my favorite group of 7-year-olds to create the Class Pumpkin for the Harvest Festival. I took the class out in small groups so they could all take a turn making our pumpkin into R2D2. Their teacher told me that if we had lights and sound effects we would win. We took it a step further & made it STAR WARS THEMED. That’s the trifecta right there (lights, sound and STAR WARS!!!). You can’t tell in this picture, but the buttons glow (buttons made from a squinkies container & the knob is made from a paint bottle top). And I downloaded a few MP3s from amazon of the Star Wars theme. My girls were THRILLED when I told them we got to keep the Star Wars music. I had to take it out of the car after 3 days though. (You can only listen to the Star Wars theme so many times before you start getting twitchy, even if it IS performed by the City of Prague Philharmonic….)

We’re making this craft at the class Halloween party on Monday. It’s a little box that you print out & fold together. (I’d say this is a age 7+ activity. We made one before & definitely had to take it step by step…

I think that’s it for now, but stay tuned. We’ll be doing lots of crafty things for the holidays!

Tree Painting in Corner

Flower Wall

Close up of flowers - kindergarten mural

Beehive

Have you ever tried to paint a mural on a brightly colored wall before? It was kind of a challenge! But fun. The last mural I painted was in E’s room when she was a baby. That was SEVEN YEARS AGO. Dude. (Add nostalgic sniffling here).

I have one more thing I want to share with you. We’ve been in our “temporary apartment” for over a year now, and I decided we needed to revamp the girls room. To make things a little more festive we hung up….

Pennant Banner

What are you in love with?

I’ve been super busy with lots of projects, which is great! (You know, except for the piles of laundry that may or may not get done this week…) And I’ve had a pretty big variety of jobs lately. And lots of animals. Animals are always fun to draw.

Here’s an illustration from an educational book I finished up this week. Happy fun times with animals!!!:

And an article for a magazine about what to expect when you have to put your horse down:

The art director said, “What can you come up with for an article on euthanasia?” Gulp.

So tell me, what would you have done? And what are you working on?

Once upon a time there were two friends who liked fun and adventure. They were 10 – 11 years old. One of them climbed trees.

They went camping. They told scary stories around the campfire.

Hey! Let’s go for a walk alone in the woods! Ok! First it’s super fun. Look, a green beetle!

What the…is that a BEAR?

I’m so glad my friend ran off and left me to get my head eaten! Oh wait, it’s just eating the berries! Phew.

THE END!

Action packed, let me tell you! This will be a very dramatic story for children learning English. We’ll see if any of them ever go camping…

So how are you? Working on any fun crafts or projects? Do share!

I’m in charge of the crafts at my mom’s group, so once a month we ladies get together to make something (hopefully) fabulous. I’m sharing because when I started doing this about three years ago, I couldn’t find a good list of ideas all in one place. Hopefully these will be of use to you. If not, just pretend.

Our budget is about $2.50 per person, per craft. That, my friends, is not a lot. Especially when you consider my lofty goals:

LOFTY GROUP CRAFT GOALS
Not Clutter: Make something that I’d like to hang in my home or that I can give away as a gift
Fairly Easy: Make something that everyone can do independently with limited “help” (since there’s only one of me to go around)
Accessible: The ladies will be able to complete the project and feel proud to show it off
Inexpensive, not Cheap: (See Lofty goal #1 + budget above)

I’m not saying every craft achieved those goals, but here are the most successful ones we’ve done lately:

FAMILY TREE

(I would upload a template for the tree, but I drew it freehand. Sorry…. )
We used 12×12″ scrapbook paper, but cut two pieces to create an 11×14″ standard-frame-size final project. It looks nicer if the leaves are color that contrasts with the background (light background, dark leaves or dark background, light leaves.)

NOTES THAT MAY HELP: The hardest part of this was figuring out how to add the leaves. They look better if they’re not RIGHT ON TOP of the branch, but kind of fanned out. The order I put our family on is grandparents at the bottom of the branch (closest to the trunk), parents coming off of them, siblings at the end of the branch with my husband & I meeting in the middle & our girls on the very top. Does that make sense? It actually took me WAY TOO LONG to figure that out, so don’t worry if you’re not following me. I wasn’t even following me at the beginning!

BIRTHDAY CALENDAR

(Confession: We haven’t actually done this one yet. It’s coming up after our Organic Gardener Guest Speaker)
I got this idea from my Mother-In-Law, she has a similar one that hangs on her fridge. It’s nice cause you don’t have to update your calendar every year, and it’s pretty enough to keep hung on the wall. (It will even be MORE helpful when I actually fill in our family & friends birthdays on there.)
The final craft is also standard frame size 11×14″. I made a grid template on 11×17″ (Tabloid) size paper. I cut squares from scrapbooking paper that are 3.7″ wide x 3.5″ tall. I printed a separate page for the white “month” squares. Glue-sticked it all together. Ta da!

Here’s the background grid template & month squares to download:
CalendarLayout
MonthSquares

SHRINKY DINK SILHOUETTE BROOCH

Seriously? I think my favorite craft we’ve ever done. I literally wear mine three times a week. See this post for my notes (scroll past the sea captain).

GLITTER WORD BANNER

Everything is better with Glitter. We used 12×12″ glitter cardstock from Michaels. It was pricey! ($2 a sheet!) But it was worth it. There was minimal glitter shedding, and it is just so dang fancy. I found that a phrase 13 letters or less worked the best. I laid the letters out in Illustrator, and MOST IMPORTANTLY, flipped them backwards, printed them on 2 separate sheets of paper and puzzle-pieced them together on the back of the cardstock so we didn’t waste any bit of it. After glue-sticking them lightly to the back of the glitter cardstock, we cut them out and scotch-taped them to a string. To get the little holes cut (like the inside of the “e” or “o” or “a”) we just cut right through a portion of the letter. The glitter was so forgiving that you couldn’t tell the “a” or “e” or “o” was taped back together. I gave each lady a file folder to wrap their banner around because these things tangle easily. You will want to say lots of bad words when you get home and they’re a jumbled heap of sadness. But if it’s not tangled, you can hang them up on your wall and feel proud.

MITTEN HANGER

I got packs of wooden hangers from Ikea and shoved them in our supply cabinet till I came up with something brilliant to do with them. This is the result. We used one inch “S” hooks from Home Depot and man-handled them onto the pine crossbar thingees. It’s kind of tricky to figure out, but once you get the first one the rest will be easier. You have to kind of push-and-twist them on. But it was either this or pre-drill 60 holes into that 1/2″ dowel for screw hooks. So “S” hooks it is! (I went to Home Depot to look for hooks and there was a nice helper guy there. I didn’t want to explain what I was trying to do. I was embarrassed he’d be all, “Um, whatever lady.” But he opened the pack of “S” hooks so I could try it out and then he was SO IMPRESSED. He told me I should patent this. But since it’s a wooden hangar and an “S” hook, I’ll just share it with you instead.)

The nice thing about this craft is that it’s versatile. Some ladies were going to use them to hang aprons. Others as a key rack. We had leftover ribbon, so we also had this option for storing/displaying barrettes:

(Dude! This post is long! Almost done, swear.)

GREETING CARDS

You can print these out, just click on the image, click again to enlarge and right-click to save. Here they are in color (for the tentative crafters):

And here’s the plain ‘ol lineart for the Advanced Crafter:

I suggest you make your cards 4.25″ x 5.5″. Because that’s a sheet of regular cardstock folded in half, then cut in half. Dude, 2 cards out of a sheet of cardstock. That’s crafty AND thrifty.

GLITTER GLUE IS NOT OPTIONAL. See how I made all the cute polka-dots on the backgrounds? They’re for you to dot glitter glue onto. You don’t have to go overboard, sometimes less IS more, but seriously, everything is better with glitter.

Random Bullet Pointed Tips:
* Size A-2 envelopes are 4.375″ x 5.75″, and fit cards that are 4.25″ x 5.5″. Do a google search for A-2 envelopes & find lots of lovely options.

* I buy reams of card stock to make my own cards, but craft stores carry nice little 25-page packs in a variety of colors that are lovely. I use a paper cutter to cut it down to the right size. If I’m really ambitious, I’ll use a butter knife to score where the paper will fold before I cut it. Then I get a pristine fold line. It’s very satisfying.

* Coloring Your Card: I think Colored Pencils are the best. Watercolors will work too (if you’ve laser-printed the designs, but if you printed it on an inkjet printer it will smear.)

* Again I say it, glitter glue is your friend. Embrace the glitter glue. For best results, color the design in first & then enhance & highlight with the glittery goodness.

Here’s a few of the cards we made for the Kidslink Project:

Phew! I think that’s it. I hope you find this useful and HAPPY CRAFTING!!!

And no, my kitchen doesn’t look like that. But my three year old does.

Since we’ve gotten back from our Holiday Travels, I’ve been working non-stop. I finished three projects this week! Dude! But luckily I’ve really liked everything I’ve been working on. I did a baby announcement for the CUTEST little guy:

So fun! Then I finished an early reader about a poor socially rejected cactus…

..who later learns that you need to bloom where you’re planted. Awwwww…

I’ve got about four different book ideas floating around in my head, plus another three projects I’ve been neglecting, so I’m excited to now have a few hours to work on them.

What are you working on? I want to hear about it!!!

I’m pretty pleased with how it turned out. I used cold press paper (I think it was Fabrino, 150lb.) Half way through the watercoloring, I stopped to ink in the lines with a #8 Pigma Micron. Then I finished the rest of the painting. (It’s amazing how much you lighter your watercolors will look once you’ve got a big fat black line next to them…)

I liked this so much that I made this year’s Christmas Card with the same technique. But you can’t see that yet, you have to wait! It’s not even Thanksgiving yet!

For my Mom’s Group, the craft this month was SILHOUETTE BROOCHES MADE FROM SHRINKEY DINKS!!!

I found this idea online, but when I went back and searched for it, I couldn’t find the link again! So thank you, random internet crafter. Great idea! I had the ladies email me pictures of their kids in profile and laid them out like this:

The ladies traced the print outs with fine tipped sharpie markers, we threw them in the oven & then hot-glued pins on the backs of them:

If you do this craft, let me warn you, Shrinkey Dinks can shrink down crazy-jacked-up sometimes! If they curl up on themselves & get stuck DON’T PANIC! Carefully un-stick them, put them back in the oven, and when you pull them out the second time, flatten them with a spatula or wooden spoon. Practically half of our ‘dinks would have been ruined, but when I re-baked them, they ALL turned out fine. (Also, “fine” doesn’t mean “perfect”. They’re melted plastic. They look awesome and are SO fun to do, but they’ll usually be slightly warped. But look how cute! I know!)

So what are you up to? Crazy crafting for the holidays?