Mother's Day Kid's Craft featuring Sally of EatBreatheBlog

We are so excited to have Sally sharing a fun craft with us today. We will let her introduce herself....

My name is Sally, and I am a sucker for a great infomercial or flashy advertisements. When it comes to dieting and fitness, I spend way too much money each month on massages, hair products, diets, food, fitness equipment, personal trainers, and gym memberships. Read my musings on active lifestyles, parenting, and green living on EatBreatheBlog.com.

Making Mother’s Day cards with potato stamps

When you were a kid – or, you know, in your early 30s – you might’ve experienced the joy that is creating art with potato stamps. Yep – a raw potato cut into a design and then dipped in color. A simple, cheap, and easy craft that generates delightful results, especially considering Mother’s Day is rapidly approaching and we’re in a recession. To make your stamps, you’ll need:

Enough potatoes to accommodate your designs. If you purchase more than a truckload, you might want to let Hallmark know they have competition.

A knife that can cut through a raw potato. You can probably use a plastic knife from a fast food restaurant but… don’t.

A pen or marker to sketch out your masterpiece. It’s tempting to get all Picasso with your spud but keep in mind that you need to carefully cut out your design, so start simple. If you end up with a design you didn’t intend, just call it abstract art.

Paint (poster, acrylic, or fabric), ink, or food coloring.

Construction paper, blank notecards, grocery sacks, the backs of window envelopes – whatever you want to stamp your design upon

Ok, let’s do this:

Wash your potato to keep dirt out of your artwork.

Cut the potato in half and blot away the resulting potato juice. (Don’t worry – the potato isn’t crying. It wants to be a part of your opus.)

Sketch out your design on each potato half. Get creative! It’s a little labor intensive, but consider cutting out an “M” and an “O” so you can spell out “MOM” in semi-ransom-note style. You can also sketch flowers, a jesus fish, geometric shapes, or something that will result in a Rorschach print. The world is your…okay, let’s move on.

Cut around the shape you created, no more than ½” into the potato, so that your design is raised from the rest of the potato surface. If you mess up, put your starchy buddy aside and make soup later.

Dip your tater into your color and then get stamp happy. Rinse with water and dry thoroughly when switching colors. Or, again, don’t – it’s your artwork and “abstract” is a nice, broad definition.

This craft will obviously work well for any occasion. Try your hand at birthday cards, design the border of a handwritten letter (another lost art), or create a piece of art to hang in your home. I recommend making the fridge your personal art gallery.

Thanks for sharing such a cute idea and fun craft Sally! Be sure to check out her blog, I love it! I have found tons of great tips to incorporate in my daily life.

Would you like to do a guest post on A lil bird? We would love to have you feature a project, your blog, or anything that strikes your fancy. Email us at alilbird3 (at) gmail (dot) com, we look forward to hearing from you!

One Dollar Wednesday... flower clip tutorial

Happy Wednesday! It's been ages since I posted, but I've been running on empty for awhile. Luckily I have my babies. I love my children so much! I hate to send my "bigs" to school every day, because they miss out on the fun the "babies" and I have.

We could do this every day...


brownies and beautiful babies, what's better than that?




Project time...
I have a plethora of artificial flowers from the Dollar Tree, and decided to finally put them to use.

I like to layer my flower clips, I think it just adds a little "something". To do this I got a bunch of flowers that were the same color.



I took my flowers apart. If you don't take these plastic pieces out, they just don't lay right.


I reassembled, or messed with the layers a bit, until I got the look I wanted. Then
glued the layers together with hot glue.



I added a flat bottomed crystal to the center of my flower.




For a more "finished" look, I covered my clip with a bit of ribbon. Just hot glued it all the way around.





Here it is, all finished. The possibilities are endless when layering, and I love these flowers for spring and summer.

Snack Planning

Now that we are done with the baby food phase and onto table food, I have found myself having to think way to hard about what to feed my lil' guy. By snack time he is hungry and ready to eat, and doesn't want to wait for Mama to think about what to feed him. Because of this, he has been eating a lot of Cheerios lately, which are ok sometimes, but not the most nutritious. A few months ago, I was talking with a friend about kids and snacking and she has such a fun system for her kids, I decided to adopt it myself. Her kids snack at 10:30 and 3:30 and they get one healthy snack and one fun snack. I loved her list and modified it a little to fit out home. I made up a list with graphics, since it will be awhile before my son is reading. Right now I just choose the snacks, but once he is a little older, he can choose what he wants off the lists.

I threw it in one of my favorite double sided frames and now I can just glance at the list and give him a snack.
Everyone is happy!

P is for Party....

Although it didn't go just according to plan, my son's first birthday still turned out pretty spectacular I'd say. The weather didn't cooperate, but my Mother in law was nice enough to let us clean her basement the night before, so we could have the party there. I felt bad, because I was planning it outdoors I invited a ton of people, but she was so nice to help make it great! I know I went overboard, but my son loved it! He was pointing to all the decorations and balloons with the biggest smile on his face! It was all worth it.

My son loves to read and he especially loves his Sesame Street books that I picked up at the dollar spot over at Target. Between his love of those books and a picture of my younger brother's birthday from 1985, I had my theme, Cookie Monster. Well Cookie Monster, plus my added theme, "use what you have."

In that photo from 1985, my Mother had made an amazing Cookie Monster Cake, I tried to copy it. Here is a photo of the cake, that I made, MYSELF, from scratch, and decorated it MYSELF too, the frosting from scratch as well. I am really proud of myself, I am not artistic whatsoever.

Here is the present table, where I hung his "monthly" photos. A couple years ago I was at IKEA and they were blowing out wrapping paper at $.25 a roll, I pick up a bunch of rolls, the same pattern, but different colors. The blue was PERFECT for a Cookie Monster theme, so perfect in fact that we used it as a backdrop for our "photo booth."
Since I already had a bunch of scrapbook paper in different shades of blue, I just went with it. I really didn't have money to spend. I found this cute paper hat template HERE. We brought over my son's Cookie Monster stuffed animal, he was a perfect addition to the party.

You may remember my frames from my bebe shower. The "cookie jars" were my baby food jars with a little Cookie Krisp cereal and my little Cookie Monster figurines were from the dollar spot at Target.

I used my Silhouette for everything in this party, it was so fast, and I love how it turned out.
I made the smash cake too!
I used different jars from my pantry, even though they were different shapes and sizes, I think they worked out well. I added some ribbon and twine to jazz them up a bit. The large jar I found at Tai Pan Trading for a steal at $7.97! I added a fun Cookie Monster sticker from Michael's to the front. I made all of the cookies from scratch, well except the Oreos, those were my husband's request, we never have them at home.
Planning early is a must for me! I saved so much money by doing so. I knew I wanted "milk bottles", but wasn't going to spend money on them. So, in January I asked coworkers to give me any old Starbucks bottles they were going to throw away. I washed them and spray painted the lids and "voila" milk bottles! I got the idea for the Cookie Monster cups from Hostess with the Mostess.
Some really inexpensive decor, tissue paper pom poms, and a felt circle garland.
I used my son's "M" from his room, it worked perfect.
For the kid's we had a game to guess how many cookies are in the cookie jar. The prize was Cookie Monster book, Cookie Monster stamp, and Cookie Monster figure, all from the dollar spot at Target.
I really scored with the favors, and didn't spent a cent of my own money. Let me explain. My husband sold some of his old text books to Amazon, so we had some online credit. I purchased these letter and number cookie cutters with the credit, so they were free! I used bags I already had from other favors, and leftover ribbon. I cut out the tags with the Silhouette and had them say "This party was brought to you by the letter "M" and the number 1." I printed out some recipes for sugar cookies to go along with them and placed them in a milk crate my Mother in law had.
We set up a coloring table for the kids with coloring pages I printed off the PBS kids website. We used an elegant paper table cloth, so we didn't have to worry about crayon on the nice ones. We had foam stickers, stamps, and Sesame Street stickers.
Overall, everyone had fun, and it turned out great, even on a budget. I think I spent around $50 total, which I felt was really reasonable for a party of 50 people. You only turn 1 once!

Help!

This is not the posted I intended to start off my post vacation, but that is the way things went. I had an amazing time in Southern Utah, going on bike rides, playing in the park, and enjoying the 70-80 degree weather. Then I had to come back to the uncertainty of Northern Utah, with it's 40-50 degree weather and looming storms. Here is where I need your help. My son's first birthday celebration is TOMORROW, and it is supposed to rain tonight and lightly snow in the morning. It may or may not be done by afternoon. I have planned the party at 6pm, OUTSIDE under our pavilion. It is covered, but the temps will only be about 45. I DO NOT have an alternate location and I invited too many people to have it at my small condo. WHAT DO I DO? Has this ever happened to you? To say I am stressed is an understatement, I have put a lot of work into this party and really wanted to have fun celebrating my baby's first year. I need some advice, any suggestions, even if you just tell me I am hosed. I hope to have some pictures to share with you later in the week, but who knows! Also, there is no way to move the date of the party, I work nights the rest of the week including the weekend. HELP!

Fun Free Easter Craft: Weekend Website

I found this cute tutorial after Easter last year and thankfully had it bookmarked. I came across it the other day and had to share. Aren't these bunnies adorable? They are quick, easy and FREE and would make such a fun gift for your kids Easter basket. Check out the tutorial here over at Elsie Marley's blog. You will love it! I am off to Southern Utah for the Easter holiday and super excited to get some sun! The blog will be on a bit of spring break for the next week, maybe a post or too, if we are up to it. Then it is birthday time! I have gone way overboard on my 1 year old's birthday, but my mother in law had it right, you only turn 1 once! Have a great weekend!!

Friday Freebie(s)

Happy Friday to you! I had BIG plans to post about a little Easter Bunny project I did this week, but my pictures are all stuck on my SD card. My CRAZY computer is having problems recognizing and reading the card. Until I can get things figured out in the "Technology Realm", you'll have to enjoy these Friday Freebies.

Free Curly Fries at Arby's:

Print out this coupon, and enjoy some yummy curly fries today!




Have you always wanted a professionally printed photo book? Be sure to take advantage of this opportunity and order your free photo book from Hot Prints


Here's to a wonderful weekend filled with beautiful spring weather, curly fries, and FUN!