Blessings Posters

Once again I LOVE the decoration we did today!!  I really am liking the way it turned out.

I once again got the idea from a craft book…this one was from a book we got from the library.  The book stated to take a piece of fabric and glue cut outs of fruits and vegetables and then fold over the top edge and hem and then stick a straight stick through it, tie on some string and hang it up…

Ours ended up being a bit different from what the book said…but I think I like our end results better!  It should last longer :-)

What I did is go to the library and use their die cut machine and made fruit and veggie cut outs from cute patterned scrapbook paper.

We then went to Wal-Mart (not knowing what I was going to end up doing before we got there) and ended up getting  a couple cute fabric fat quarter (that you use for making quilts), some stick on glittered foam letters and a poster frame.

When we got home I used my scrapbook adhesive and stuck the fabric to the back of the poster frame.  We then stuck on letters (made the words “Harvest of Blessings”) and stuck on the fruit and veggies using the scrapbook adhesive tape runner.

We then assembled the poster frame and ended up with a very nice looking picture to hang on the wall.

And…it fits so well on the wall that I put it on that this just may turn out to be our seasonal poster wall…we can make one for each season or holiday!  Looks like we will be making a Christmas one soon :-)

Here are some pictures of the finished product (sorry for the flash glare)

 

Soft Sculpture Turkeys

Our Fall Decoration craft was super fun today!!

I found this idea from a craft book.  They said to get a pair of gloves and stuff them with poly-fil stuffing then either sew the wrist of the glove together or glue it.  They then said to take craft feathers and stick through the fingers of the glove and then embellish with google eyes, a gobble, etc…

I originally wanted brown gloves but when I saw that Target had these black gloves on the $1 aisle I couldn’t pass them up!!  Of course Target did not have any craft feathers and I wasn’t in the mood to go to Wal-Mart when we were out yesterday so I came up with another idea for feathers.  I cut out feathers from construction paper and then taped toothpicks to the back of them so that we could stick them in the fingers.  It worked like a charm!

I also realized today that I didn’t have any google eyes that were a size that would work with our gloves but I did have brass brad fasteners.  Not only did it give the turkey a nice brass eye…I let the back of the fastener stick back through the glove to make the beak!  It worked perfect!

The boys sure loved sticking their feathers in their turkeys!!!  This will be fun to bring out year after year…we could even change the feathers every year!!

Here are some finished pictures.

You can kind of see how I did the brads to make the beak in the pictures below  (there is a brad on each side of the turkey)

Fall Decorations

I have been wanting to start having the boys help me make decorations for the house for the different seasons.  I think it would be so fun to pull out the decorations we have made in the house and then make new ones to add to the collection. In just a few years we could have a house full of reminders of fun memories!!

We are hosting a dinner for our Sunday School class on Saturday night at our house so I decided to go ahead and make some fall decorations for the house and start this tradition!  We are going to try to make at least one decoration every day this week if we can!

Tonight we made a wreath and mantle garland.  I will admit both ended up being advanced for my 4 year old and 2 year old but I did my best to get them to help where I could and it must have worked because they feel proud and really feel like they helped!

The wreath started off to be like a wreath that I found online somewhere (can’t remember where) where they took a wire coat hanger and made it into a circle and then put slits in toilet paper rolls and slid them on and then glued leaves all over it.    You turn around the hook of the hanger so that it can work as a hook for your wreath.

Well I got the wreath prepped with all of that (I got it in the best circle that I could…it is hardly a perfect circle though) and pulled out my box of fake fall leaves that I had.  Well I had in there some decoration sticks that had apples or pumpkins or pine cones with flowers and leaves (don’t know what you call them) and thought they would be pretty.  But of course they were too heavy to glue on the toilet paper rolls…so I ended up attaching them straight to the wire coat hanger with pipe cleaners (had to work with what I had – HA!).  We then glued the leaves on the toilet paper rolls in between them.  I can’t believe that we actually got it to work in the end.

I had Seth pull leaves from their plastic stems and then Aaron would hand them to me and point to where he thought I should put it.  I glued them because I used hot glue so they would stick better. 

Here is the end result.

The other decoration we did was a mantle garland!  I actually saw this idea on the Rachel Ray show today (this is my show that I tape and then relax and enjoy while the kids are napping :-)).

On the show they took a ribbon and some decorative paper clips and silk leaves (they gave the idea of using real leaves for it to).  All they did was paper clip the leaves to the ribbon and then hang the ribbon on the mantle.  It was super easy and super cute!!

Well I don’t have any of those fancy paper clips and doubt my wal-mart in my little town would carry them, but I figured – hey why couldn’t we just staple them on!! 

I gave Seth some leaves and Aaron some flowers and I had them alternate giving me leaves and flowers for me to staple on the ribbon (it actually was a good little lesson in patterns…we may try this again for Christmas garland and maybe find something that would be more than two objects to do a little bit more difficult patterning exercise!). 

Here is our garland!  I LOVED how this turned out!

Tomorrow we are planning on doing some stained glass leaves.  We don’t have good leaves around our house because we have mostly mesquite leaves but we are going to library tomorrow morning and the library yard has some HUGE beautiful leaves!  We are going to make a point to pack a bag so we can pick up some leaves!!

I am really excited about this new tradition…I hope and pray I keep up with it because it really could be a treasure a few years down the road!!