Valentine's mantel piece

Pickles and I stumbled upon this project
while making a Valentines window piece with contact paper.
One project morphed into another awesome project and I love the final result.

Materials:

Valentines-esque paper
Contact paper
Jute

Tools:

Scissors
Tape
Hole punch

The initial idea was contact paper on the window.
I cut out a bunch of heart shapes, give Nik some feathers
 and let him go to town.

I find that masking tape works great on glass for projects like this.
It peels smooth off of the glass and contact paper.

As always, we had an audience of one
waiting under foot for a random feather to fall. 

 

Pickles insisted we take a break from Valentines 
to make a cat toy for our friend.
We tied and taped a few feathers onto some jute
 and a cat-toy was born. 

After the cat break, we moved on.

The grouping and placement of Nik's hearts and feathers
made me think of a heart swag, wreath or draping mantle piece. 

The next day we did the same thing but on the table. 

I think Nik had pink heart overload.
He ran to his workbench grabbed a wrench and advised me this
project needed more banging. 

 I threw a similar size piece of contact paper 

over the finished products.
Sticky sides together.


I cut out hearts and groups
of hearts from the Contact paper.

I let Pickles operate the hole punch. 

We punched a hole into every heart and group of hearts.

He loved that part.

 

We strung the hearts through jute and attached the piece to the mantle. 

Awesome!

Letter Fishing

Fishing!
Nik is not exactly sure what one does while fishing, but he does know he desperately wants to do it.
I decided to create an at-home fishing game. 

I picked out 7 different colors of thin foam and free-handed a fish template.
No worries, I won't quit my day job and try to
make a living making perfect fish templates.
My family would starve. 

Materials:

7 foam sheets
Googly eyes (2 for each fish)
Letter stickers
Large piece of paper

Wooden spool
Wooden dowel or rod
String/Jute
Magnets (1 for each fish, 1 large one with a hole in the middle as a "hook")
Hot glue sticks

Tools:

Hot glue gun
Scissors

Blue Crayon

I went through all of my different letter stickers
and located two N, I, K, O, L, A and S's.
What's that spell?!

Nikolas!
Front and back.

A little name fun.

I free-handed a pond as well and colored it

When the hubs heard I was making a fishing pole he insisted it be functional (which didn't turn out, unfortunately).
And that the fishing pole part be left up to a professional.
A professional fake-fishing-pole-maker, and he wanted the job.

The hubs hot glued a wooden spool and string to a
fishing pole to create the appearance of functionality.

A magnet was tied to the end of the string.

And of course I added some jute over the
hot glued spots to make it look neater.

We set the pond and fish at the bottom
of a staircase and handed Pickles the fishing pole.
He was so excited!

The cat started taking serious interest in our fishing game.
This just expanded Niks fun. 

Trying to catch the fish was fun enough,
but trying to catch fish during an enemy attack
is even more super awesome fun.

The fishing continued for over an hour.
Nik loved catching a fish and announcing the letter on each one.

This craft goes in the major success pile as
there were serious giggles and laughs.

This project is fun even without a cat of your own.
Try it!