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!

Citrus Lane review Jan 2014

Citrus Lane's January box made Nikolas very happy. 

The shipping box had the same design on it as December's box. 

I love the white snowflake look. 

Nik grabbed for the markers first. 
These bad boys are double sided and major super awesome bonus, 
they are washable.

The box also contained an activity book.
Very age appropriate. We have not used this yet.

The upset tummy & nausea relief was my favorite item.
I just adore when Citrus Lane sends us things
Nik can use in the tub; lotions and herbal medicines,
their next addition should be kid lip-balm.

They also included a card for 20% off at Ruby Ribbon.
It appears to be another "start your own business" kit.
Buy-our-starter-bundle-and-sell-the-items-to-your-friends kind of thing. 

The best item in the entire box is a wooden assorted fruit 
set that can be cut into halves. 

This set comes with a wooden knife and bag to hold
all of your toddlers wooden fruit paraphernalia, 

as well as three pieces of fruit with very strong Velcro in the middle. 

Nik found the fruit-cutting to be extremely fascinating.
It kept him busy for quite some time.

The Velcro is strong so your toddler
will have to work to get that knife through. 

I explained to Pickles that he should not be cutting his fruits in his lap,
 as that showed a serious lack of basic knife safety and knife fundamentals.
His response "wha?".

Overall this box was loved by all.

 Do you want to try Citrus Lane for yourself?  Link here

 Get a surprise box of the best products for your child every month

Super hero cuff

Nik's imagination gets bigger everyday.
I love being able to give him "props"
so he can stretch that imagination muscle. 

Currently he is all about superheroes,
and what superhero doesn't have a superhero cuff?

My intention was to make these out of thick felt & Velcro, 

or some other cuff like material.
But it occurred to me that my husband had unused 80's
 wrist bands just going to waste, so I liberated one from his stash. 

Materials:

Sweatband

Felt
Sticker back fabric stars
Fabric letter N for Pickles!

Tools:

Ruler
Pinking shears

How did I know how long to make the felt pieces? 
I just wrapped some felt around the sweatband and eyeballed it. 
Yep, I have a picture of a ruler in my tools list, but I didn't use it once. 

 

I learned some valuable lessons during this activity. 
First, thin felt stretches in a horrible way. 
After gluing both the felt blue pieces onto the cuff and letting it dry,
 I  pulled on the cuff to check how stretchy 
it was and pulled the darn thing out of shape.

I recovered from the stretchy felt situation and placed the
fabric sticker star and letter N over the felt blue pieces.

When I gave Nik the cuff the next morning he was psyched.
Super psyched!

He immediately ran off to be the mayor of hero town and

 take pictures of himself with his Scout phone.
He loves it! Pickles calls it his superhero wrist band.

 

Paper wad tree

I actually had no intention of blogging about this craft,
but it turned out so cute I just had to share.

I have seen many variations of this craft online,
and I knew Nik would love it.
Because of the wading paper aspect and the glue of course.
He just loves glue.

I was not quite sure what to call this project,
the hubs advised me that it looks like a paper wad tree.
Paper wad tree it is.

Materials:

Paper to print on
Paper squares to wad

Tools:

Glue

scissors
(Only if you need to cut the squares or trim the picture)

I gathered materials, which only consisted of paper squares,
a printed picture of a tree & glue.
I had the squares from a previous project.
Found a bag of them at a craft store for 3.99.

 

Any project that uses glitter glue is a friend of mine. 

I found the tree template at a free printable's site.
I showed Nik had to wad the paper, explained that we
were making leaves and let him go.

 

He had so much fun.
And I just loved how simple it was. 

Nik told me this project made him happy. 

The result is gorgeous. I cannot wait to frame this one.