August 30, 2010

College Name Board

This is another one of those projects that I've had 95% done for a few years and I finally put the finishing touches on it!  I found these letters at Michael but it wasn't until after I bought them that I realized they would be hard to cover because the edges are rounded.  After getting some advice from friends, I settled on doing a college on each letter.  
I first painted each letter and than I glued each little paper on with mod podge.  I finished up by putting several coats mod podge on top.  Very simple!  I did the airplane and car the same way except it was a little harder to paint before putting the paper on top.  They were already painted a really ugly blue and red so I spent the effort to repaint them before covering them.  


The unfortunately thing about his project is that I'm going away from these colors in my son's room now that he isn't a baby anymore.  Oh well!  I guess it will teach me to not procrastinate finishing projects!  

I think that the letters were each $1 and the airplane and car were on clearance at Michaels for .25 cents each. I'm not sure how much the board was but you can find things like that at thrift stores that either need to be repainted or sanded and stained again.  

August 17, 2010

Pokemon ABC's

I had a grand idea the other day...I would use my son's current obsession with POKEMON as a teaching tool. My son knows more about Pokemon than any 4 year old should ever know (maybe more than a 25 year old should know), but we have certainly had a difficult time tackling letters and numbers. He nearly refuses to pick up a pen or pencil and write, so my hope was if I combined Pokemon and ABC's (yes, there are Pokemon for every letter of the alphabet), he might get excited about it writing and learning those letters . We'll hope and wish and work for the best! (By the way... a cool thing about this project is that it cost me $0.99 because I ran out of glue and had to buy more. I had the blank book already and just created my own template on Publisher and printed the pics off at home)

The introduction to the book went well! My son told me that he was "going to work the hardest to be the best Pokemon trainer in the world." We may have found the ticket to getting this boy excited about reading, writing, and understanding those symbols on a page: POKEMON!

August 11, 2010

Appliqued Onesies

Threw a baby shower for a friend. Didn't want to play games. All of the guests made appliqued onesies instead. Loved the way they turned out!

(onesies started out in the "cake" and everyone had to take a "piece". please forgive the cluttered table...all of the candy and desserts were spread out and looked super cute, but we had too many little kiddos who could reach the treats! so my table got rearranged)

I asked everyone to bring some cotton fabric scraps, I printed pictures off for ideas/templates (in grayscale and on fast draft) and provided the onesies, and this is what we came with:(I generally use wonder-under/iron-on adhesive for appliques but I learned that spray adhesive works GREAT. I think you can sometimes get away without sewing around the edges with wonder-under but you most definitely have sew around the glued fabric because the adhesive will lose its stickiness over time or as you wash it)

SUCCESS!!!