Playroom Progress: Fingerprint Art

I'm still trudging along as slow as molasses on the playroom gallery wall. I'm reaching the finish line, though! Hopefully, once I frame the artwork I bought at a craft show last month, I'll be able to hang everything up!

After creating this elephant painting with Little One, I decided to try another piece of kid-made artwork with him. I was reading about different wall artwork ideas in my favorite home book, Young House Love. (LOVE this book! Run and get it if you don't already have it! And, of course, check out their amazing blog!) I decided to combine two of their ideas for the playroom--Tip #152-Commission Kid Art and Tip #156-Make Fingerprint Art.

I snatched up a cheap 5x7 frame at Target and dug through my scrapbook paper stash for some solid colored cardstock paper that coordinated with the playroom colors. I cut 10 rectangles out of the papers and glued them down to the stock photo that came with the frame.

I looked up different animal fingerprint ideas on Google Images and mapped out my plan on scratch paper...which animals I wanted to do, which colors to use, and the direction to make the fingerprints go inside each rectangle.  I was planning to use a stamp pad for the fingerprints, but my paper was textured, so the stamps didn't show up well. I made a last minute call to whip out the finger paints and that worked out great!

I called in my willing helper to do the fingerprinting. He loved it! I have no pictures of this part because I'm apparently not Super Woman nor an octopus and couldn't direct a toddler with finger paints and hold my camera all at the same time. Haha!

Once all the paints were dry, I went back to my Google Image search and attempted to draw on the details to the animals. I say attempted because they are far from perfect. But, it kind of gives them character, right? At least that's what I'm telling myself. ;)

Done! Can't wait to get this baby up on the wall!

I'm loving both DIY art projects for the gallery wall! (Elephant painting here.)

Linking up to Young House Love!

White Chocolate Peppermint Fudge

I'm a huge sucker for anything white chocolate + peppermint, so when I saw this recipe for white chocolate peppermint fudge, I had to try it out! It is really rich and yummy and easy to make. Enjoy the recipe! 

Ingredients: 

-1/4 cup butter, softened plus about 1 1/2 tsp butter for greasing the pan

-2 cups granulated sugar

-1/2 cup sour cream

-12 oz white chocolate chips

-1 jar (7oz) marshmallow cream

-1/2 cup crushed peppermint candy (I crushed them pretty small so the fudge wouldn't be crunchy.)

-1/2 tsp peppermint extract

Directions:

-Line an 8 or 9 inch square pan with foil. Grease the foil with about 1 1/2 tsp butter; set aside. 

-In a large saucepan, combine the sugar, sour cream, and 1/4 cup butter. Cook and stir over medium heat until sugar is dissolved. Bring to a rapid boil; cook and stir until a candy thermometer reads 234 degrees (soft-ball stage), about 5 minutes. (I didn't test temperature, just cooked for slightly less than 5 minutes.)

-Remove from heat; gradually stir in white chocolate chips and marshmallow creme until melted. Fold in peppermint candy and extract. Pour into prepared pan. Chill unitl firm. 

-Using foil, lift fudge out of pan. Gently peel off foil; cut fudge into 1 inch squares. Store in the refrigerator. Yield: 2 pounds. Original recipe can be found here.

Linking up to The Larson Lingo's Cookie Exchange. Check out all the other cookie recipes and Mel's blog here! 

New Look

Well, I got tired of the old, cheesy header, so updated things around here. Definitely not perfect, but better than it was! :) I soooo need Photoshop. Let's just say I did the header...um, makeshift style. MS Word+Paint. Oh yeah, Baby. High tech. Haha!

Soft Christmas Cookies

I'm copying this post over from my old blog. Sorry if you've already read it, but I wanted to have it all in one place. And, let's face it, I love these cookies! They're worth two posts! :)

I am super picky about my Christmas sugar cookies. I don’t like really crispy, crunchy cookies and I don’t like for them to taste like you used a lot of flour when rolling them out. Told you I was picky! I found this recipe last year on allrecipes.com and love it! The cookies are soft, but not so fragile they fall apart when you pick them up and they have a nice buttery taste. Enjoy!

Ingredients:

3 cups all purpose flour (plus a little extra on the side for rolling)
1 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp salt
1 cup margarine, softened
1 1/2 cups white sugar
2 eggs
2 tsp vanilla extract

Directions:

Sift flour, baking powder, and salt together then set aside. In a large bowl, cream together margarine and sugar until light and fluffy. Beat in the eggs one at a time, then stir in the vanilla. Gradually blend in the sifted ingredients until fully absorbed.  Cover dough and chill for 2 hours.

Preheat oven to 400 degrees. Grease cookie sheets or line sheets with parchment paper (works great!). On a clean, floured surface, roll out small portions of chilled dough to 1/3 inch thickness. You will need to work some flour into the dough, but don’t over do it. Just keep your rolling pin and your surface lightly floured and gently roll out. I only ran my rolling pin over the dough a couple times. Cut out shapes using floured cookie cutters.

Bake 6-8 minutes in preheated oven until middle of cookie is set and no longer wet/shiny looking. Remove from cookie sheets to cool on wire racks.

I used Bridget at Bakeat350′s icing recipe to decorate with. Check out all her awesome cookies!

I linked up to The Larson Lingo's Cookie Exchange last year. Love her blog! Will post another recipe for her cookie exchange tomorrow! :)

Christmas Tree Crafts

As I was decorating our fireplace mantel, I was struggling to find something large to put up on one side. I was thinking about doing these wire trees, but was afraid they wouldn't feel substantial enough for our oversized fireplace. My friend Amy posted a picture of her fireplace and I caught a glimpse of her cute silver trees. I remembered seeing a how to tutorial on a blog and knew they'd be perfect for my mantel! I'm going to call it Amyspiration.

Before I get into the silver trees, though, I must show you Amy's mantel. I'm in love with it! Check out the beautiful wood artwork! Swoon, right?! She said her hubby did the wood part and she did the painting. She is super humble and tried not to take credit for it since she first saw the idea on Pinterest here, but just DOING something off Pinterest is amazing to me! I have a bazillion things pinned and have only done a couple. This girl is great at finding inspiration online, making it work for her home, then actually getting it done! She did such a great job! 

Here are her trees that she made using this tutorial she found linked on Pinterest. Aren't they beautiful?! One is made from tinsel ribbon, one is made of pinecones, and one is made from beads that she cut off of floral picks. I love her trees!!! The girl's got style!

Now that you've seen some of her Christmas decor, raise your hand if you think she should start a blog. What? Unanimous hand raising going on? That seals the deal, Amy. The people have spoken. Please start a decorating blog! :) 

Armed with my Amyspiration, I headed to the craft store to pick up supplies for my trees! I followed the same tutorial on Shauna Mailloux's blog to create my trees. Shauna has great, detailed instructions and photos on her site, so check it out. It really was easy peasy! 

For the first tree, I just wrapped tinsel ribbon around my paper cone, hot gluing it down. I topped it with a silver ball. 

The second tree I made, I used a piece of sparkly silver paper to make the cone, then glued on glitter craft balls. 

For the tallest tree, I used a piece of poster board I had on hand to make the cone. I sprayed painted it silver then used silver glitter paper to cover the cone. I had originally planned to make a pine cone tree like Amy's, but my pine cones were too old and brittle and I kept finding bugs in my pine cones (shutter). Sad. But I like the way the paper one turned out! 

I'm loving how they turned out! Thanks for the inspiration and the motivation, Amy! And, thanks for letting me share your awesomeness! 

I had some white glitter paper that I didn't end up using, so whipped up a quick paper leaf wreath for the fridge door. I just cut out paper leaves, rolled them around a marker to give them some dimension, and hot glued them together in a circle. I hung it with a ribbon and taped the end of the ribbon to the inside of the fridge door. Easy! 

Jeremy's working on a special project for the fireplace right now. When he finishes, I'll share the whole fireplace with you! 

Linking up to Centsational Girl's Christmas Crafts Link Party, Two Twenty One, Keep Up with the Johnson's Pintertest Kitchen, and Hi Sugarplum! 

    

DIY Christmas Tree Skirt

Last year on after Christmas sales, we snagged a big variety box of silver ornaments at Target for 50-75% off. I'm really loving the silver on our tree this year! Bad news, though, for our $6 gold, cheapie Christmas tree skirt that we bought our first married Christmas. It looked awful with the silver/red Christmas theme we've got going on in our house this year. It's ok, I never really liked that tree skirt to begin with. Gold is not really my jam.

Anywho... I told Hubby the first world drama of our clashing skirt/ornament problem and asked him what our budget was for a new tree skirt. I got a blank, slow blinking stare. Haha! That usually means it's time to get creative. I follow Centsational Girl's blog and she recently posted this gorgeous tree skirt that she made. I love the colors and the scalloped effect! 

I decided to try a felt scalloped skirt and headed to the fabric store to pick up two colors of felt, hoping to find red and silver. Unfortunately, they didn't have silver, so I ended up going with all red. I'm sad I didn't get the two toned effect, but still like the results, nonetheless. :) 

Let me apologize in advance for the quality of some of these photos. My camera has been full of family photo shoots, so I was using my phone and it was dark.

Here's my supplies... 2 yards of red felt, old Christmas tree skirt, glue gun and lots of glue sticks, scissors, and a marker. Ignore the beads. They were a failed attempt at embellishments. Pipe cleaners ended up doing the trick!

You'll notice sewing machine and thread is not on my supply list. Are you surprised? Hot glue worked just fine and allowed me to, once again, avoid sewing anything. Win!

I folded my fabric and cut it into equal pieces and stacked it four layers high. Any more than four layers of felt was hard to cut through. I figured out how big I wanted my scallops and cut out one scallop to use as a stencil. I drew all my scallops out onto the top layer, then cut them out.

After cutting a million scallops out, I started gluing them down to my tree skirt. I used a line of glue across the straight part of the scallops and made my way around the outside edge, slightly overlapping the fabric as I glued. Then, I moved up a few inches and added another row of scallops. Here's my skirt after two rows of fabric. This is when I realized that one yard was not enough fabric and I'd need to go back to the fabric store for another yard. Whomp whomp. 

To make sure all of the gold skirt was covered up, I cut a circle of felt and glued it down to the middle of the skirt and cut a hole out in the middle. Doing this helped me avoid needing to match up or trim the edges of the scallops to fit around the inside circle. 

I just continued doing rings of scallops until I got up near the opening in the middle and all of the gold was covered. It took me five layers all together. 

At this point, it was looking sort of plain because I had only done one color. I wanted to incorporate some silver into the skirt, but my original idea of a beaded border didn't work out. The beaded strand didn't make clean enough creases to follow the scallops. Moving on to Plan B--silver pipe cleaners. All I did was wrap the pipe cleaners in a tight spiral to make circles, tucking the end of the pipe cleaner under to keep it together. I glued them on to the outer layer of scallops, doing every other scallop. 

Done! The best part? It only cost about $6 to update my skirt! BOOM! 

Linking up to Thrifty Decor Chick and Two Twenty One!