Project #6: Mom, my babies need a bed

Just sharing this easy idea- a $4 wooden cd crate makes the perfect cradle for small dolls. She painted this all by herself so it makes it even more special (and it now has a permanent place on her bed). Her monkey babies also needed food so we took a little doll bowl, printed a clipart picture of banannas, and used epoxy glue and some yellow stickles to make it look extra special.

Anyone remember the monchhichi's? (the biggest draw of course for a 3-year old baby/ princess obsessed little girl is their 'ba-ba's' are permanently attached to their hand) We've been watching a lot of youtube tv epidodes lately. There were only a few (really bad quality) Monchhichi shows but her auntie passed on an old Sailor Moon plush backpack and now we know all the songs....

Fighting evil by moonlight
Winning love by daylight
Never running from a real fight
She is the one named Sailor Moon!

Project #5: princess frames

The plan is to repaint girly girl's room pink (of course). I printed our favorite princess pics from Disneyland and bought some $1.50 frames.

Aren't they pretty?

Project #4: our very own dinosaur suitcase

Yep I am getting very behind on my 52 projects goal- or at least posting them anyways :)

We actually completed this one last month. I stole the original idea for a dinosaur suitcase from this blog. If you want a tutorial check it out!

I had planned on doing this at Christmas but ran out of time but the thrift store suitcase was waiting for us.

We used a hot chocolate container (volcano), 2 boxes from the recycling (caves), and a $6 can of Great Stuff expandable foam.

We prepped the suitcase by painting it brown and once the base was done the kids did all the rest of the grass and lake painting (we were messy a few days in a row!)

The expandable foam was also painted (and to keep it that way we sprayed it with some clear sealant).

The kids also helped with the hot gluing (yes I'm crazy) of the rocks and trees. I started following Teacher Tom's blog and reading more about his projects with hot glue guns and preschoolers. So off to the store we went for some low-temp glue guns.

Most of this stuff we had around the house but we did spend another $10 or so on 'lava' rocks and more trees. So totally cost for this project was about $16.

And of course the best part is it closes together with all the dinos inside!

Project #3- Autograph books

I am so happy to be part of an amazing online community- some of these women I've known for over 5 years now. Lucky for me when Michaels runs out of the supplies I need (lol) other crazy online crafters are there to support my addiction (thanks Dawn!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!)

Here are the homemade autograph books for the kids. The cool part is I dusted off my Cricut for this one (you know that cutter that I promised my hubby I'd use all the time because I NEEDED it).

I used a pretty inexpensive 4X6 sketch book and to make the books more durable I laminated each cover and glued it to a piece of cereal box. The cool part is that Alladin commented that "someone did a good job on these" while he was signing (yep I was always a fan of his!)

And guess what, they are now FULL of signatures of all the characters we met!

Thanks Pluto, Mickey, Minnie, Pooh bear, Dora, that guy from Pinnochio that we can't remember the name, all the Princesses, etc.. etc.......................

Project #2- Ikea knockoff

For our room makeover the little guy found this canvas at Ikea for $35. So we took a picture of it.....



Bought a $5 canvas at Jysk and we painted our own!

Project #1- Headbands

And here is the first and an easy one too. Hot glue, cheap headbands, + ribbon and other doo-dads = fabulous headbands for my little girly girl.

Just keep wrapping the ribbon around the headband while burning your fingertips with the hotglue. :)

A perfect way to match to her little outfits. Since we can never find matching socks in this house at least her headband can match.

our latest two boxes

So while 'surfing blogs when I should have been doing something important like cleaning my disaster of a house or doing coursework for that Masters degree that I'm supposed to be working on hard on,' I came across another cool bloggy site- Pink and Green Mama

And of course I decided right then and there that an ocean box was exactly what I needed to make my kids-but instead of just rocks I'll add gallons of water. And wait if I keep their socks on will that equal washing the floors?

Add colored rocks and shells from the good ole Dollarama, one tube of sea animals, the lego boat, a scuba pirate dude from dollarama, the MickeyD's mermaid, a treasure chest that used to have some sort of hard yucky gum, a $7 plastic bin + 2 kids = so much fun.



But what happens when winter comes? It snows of course! Except this kind is way more fun because it's inside. But it's still fluffy and cold and you can shape it, kinda. And it lasts weeks!

Add some penguins, polar bears, a Reindeer and some Husky dogs and we have winter!



Next up- sand. Yes I'm crazy but crazy is the best kind.

Look out Fisher Price!

How cute are these?



from l to r- my little boy (he likes the monster t-shirt), my little girl, me (can you see the resemblence?), not sure, baby girls best friend, not sure

I rediscovered a post on Jenn's blog and thought wow those would be some cute homemade Little People! So off to Michael's we went because of course when I get something in my head I need to make it make it happen, NOW! We found the heads with the faces prepainted (I just did the hair!) and then we found wooden spools that we painted then modge podged with scrap patterned papers (because of course I have more than enough scrap paper to make as many little People as there are people in North America).



The little girl thinks they are very pretty. :P

While we were in the wood section we also found a whole bunch of little wooden blocks in a package for about $3 (= SCORE!). After gluing them into different sized buildings both kiddos had fun painting them up and then I did the final touches. To make it easier I used blank label stickers from the $ store to make the windows and doors. Our town is complete with a pizza place, 7-11, apartment building, houses, police station and school.


A black foam board ($2 at Walmart) and some crayons and voila- our own little city for the lil guys collection of micro cars!!!!


We also bought road sign stickers (Dollarama is our friend) but we still need to pick up toothpicks so we can push them into the foam and make our city roads more authentic (may have to use a pencil and make some potholes too :P) The only thing is missing is a mayor and tax collection.

dinosaur island!

Okay I have to post this project from last weeekend because well, it's the coolest thing we have ever done and it so deserves it's own blog post. In fact it was so cool and amazing that, at the end of the day before bed, my little guy SOBBED in my arms when it to be taken apart.

Yes kids sobbing shouldn't be a happy thing but it made it all worth it.

It started with this post from a crazy, amazing mom who is now on my blog stalking list.

And here's what we did.

First we used recylables including a pizza box with a pyrex dish cut into it and lots of tin foil (I ended hot gluing some of the boxes and tinfoil together to help make it a solid unit)



And a million (emphasis on a million) homemade playdough batches later and it became this:



It took us a couple days to prepare for this project- making the playdough, finding everything we needed. I had the little guy SO into it. One night we went "rock hunting" around the neighborhood to find all the best rocks. We found the ants and spiders at the dollar store (perfect timing with Halloween!) We used every lego plant, bush, snake, and shark we could find. The ferns and plants were another sweet dollar store find that were easily cut to the right height.

The lake was a big hit, especially with the baby, and the blue food color made it that much cooler. It got pretty slimey at the end of the day but I was impressed everything stayed together pretty well. If it wasn't in the middle of my diningroom table and if I wasn't worried about water damage I would have left it a few days even though it was drying out to let them have more play out of it.



Did I mention LOTS of homemade playdough batches?



And the coolest part yet that made the boys FREAK



Daddy got in on the fun too :) Daddys pretty cool, but not as cool as mommy.

messy messy fun

Okay here is my mission #2 for Mission to Create. I used 4 of the 5 prompts only this time because I didn't have any cork but now I need some- does that count? I used green, purple, and orange/ halloween/ stamping/ wallet sized pic. This was super fun to throw together while watching Dexter! lol



We got *really* messy today painting pumpkins. Here is my favorite artsy (yeah right, I do try though) shot. I love the little feet.