Chore Sticks

I found these cute chore sticks.  You print out the files from her blog, cut and glue them to jumbo craft sticks.  I made these with some friends, so that helps to have people to talk to while cutting, and cutting, and cutting.  I found the clear jar at Wal-Mart in the kitchen area.  Then I just made a label out of vinyl.

I didn't end up wanting/needing all the chores, so I would suggest that you print out the files (I didn't want to cut and glue the blank ones for the back of the sticks, so I didn't print those pages) and mark off to the side which ones you want and count them up.  That will let you know how many craft sticks to buy.  For example, the files have chores for 3 different bathrooms (master, guest, and kids).  I only have 2 bathrooms in my house, so we didn't need the 3rd set. 

My kids are 2 and 4, so they can't do the majority of these.  But to get them excited, I have them each pick a stick or two and either I do it alone, or they help me - depending on the task.  Or I say "it says to clean up your room" when it really said to "wash windows" so that I can have them clean or keep busy...they can't read yet, so I can get away with a little fib for now.   :)  For some reason, they are happy about cleaning their rooms if the chore stick told them to.

Sprucing up a mirror

Oops!  It's been a month since I posted.  Sorry :)

My sister's family moved recently, and my 12 year-old niece has her own room now.  So for her birthday I decided to get her an "over-the-door" mirror to add to her new "growing up" room.  I got the mirror at Target.

But the mirrors at the store are just so boring.  So what does a Cricut owner do?  She adds vinyl to it of course.  I just added a monogram with dot border to the top.  I also cut out a bunch of circles in a couple different colors, but didn't stick them on.  I gave her the sheet of dots so that she could decorate it more if she wanted.  I also tied a bow on top (that would stay on once the packaging was removed).

Definately more cute and girly - and more personal too!

Growth Chart Board

I've always wanted to make a growth chart, but hadn't found a style I was sure I wanted to make until a friend of mine asked me to cut the vinyl for her to make a growth chart.  So that was easy to just cut a second set for myself.  We were going off the idea seen online in several places where we use a 1"x8" that is 6' long and stain it or paint it and apply vinyl numbers and lines to mark the inches.

All the boards I've seen online just show the board before the kid's heights are marked on the board, so I kinda had to figure that part out by trial and error to get what I liked best.  I decided to make a line at the height and then add my kid's name and age. 

I've decided to mark my kids on their birthday (give or take a few days) so that I can have each mark a year apart.  I've always written down my children's height, weight, and other stats from all their annual doctor appointments, so I was able to go back to their birth weight that way even though I hadn't been measuring them and marking it down myself each year. 

I also hung a picture of each of my kids next to the chart...that I'll change out as they grow.

The challenge I had was how to hang it up...if I hung it up with the standard picture hangers you can attach, my kids would just bump it or tug on it and it would fall down.  Not safe...so I actually decided to hang it up on the wall that is next to the refrigerator.  Our fridge sidles up to a wall, so on the opposite side of that wall, we just screwed the board to the wall from the back.  We pulled the fridge out, attached 3 screws through the wall (top, middle, and bottom) to the back of the board.  Since that side of the wall is hidden by the fridge, I wasn't worried too much that the screw would be visible and just slid the fridge back in.

The only thing I didn't like about how this turned out was that every knot is more noticeable when you stain the wood. 

Spring Stacker

Here's my Spring/Easter Stacker.

Wood is a 2x2 cut to 4", 5.5" and 7"

Fonts:
sunshine - smiley monster
raindrops - dreamed about you
springtime - pharmacy

Valentine's Stacker

Here's my Valentine's Day Stacker...

pic from my phone, so the colors are a bit brighter than actual colors.  But I opted to go with all pink shades of paper instead of red - I love the middle paper - it's actually a raspberry sherbet color...not neon like the pic is showing.  I also made a glitter heart for the top stacker ... cause glitter is just fun!

Here's the fonts I used:
Love - Smiley Monster
Hugs & Kisses - Thinking of You
Be My Valentine - O{Photo} Shoot!

Box of Princesses

I have loved painting peg people - here were some previous ones I did for my son.  But when I saw this idea by Lil Blue Boo, I decided to do another round of peg people.  I ended up making 3 sets...that's 24 dolls to paint.  It took about 2 weeks of nap times to do this - but it was fun. 

**Just an apology about my photos for a while.  Our house got broken into last week and one of the things they stole was our way awesome camera - a Nikon D80 :(  so my pictures for the forseeable future will be from my phone - which isn't anywhere near as good quality as my camera was.  Luckily, I had emptied the memory stick a couple days before we were robbed (all except for the photos of these peg dolls - so I had to get my friend to send me pics of the finished set with the lunch box since I had already given it away.)

My 6 year old niece was the initial recipient of these, and then I decided that I wanted to make a set for my 2 year old and a friend's 2 year old as well.  But the 2" dolls are a bit of a choking hazard to that age.  So I saw the set from Homemade by Jill and she found some 3.5" dolls online.  Both the 2 year olds love Tinkerbell, so I added her in - even though she's not technically a "princess."  I'm so grumpy about my stolen pictures.  My phone pics don't do these justice - Snow White turned out awesome, and I painted Rapunzel's hair with a metallic gold/yellow since her hair glows when she sings :)

Here you can see the back of the dolls - to get the hair details I did.  No one posted how they did the hair in the back, so it took a while to figure out how to get some of them to look just right.

Also, here's a pic of one of each size in my hand so you can see the size difference.

**I found the lunch box at Jo-Anns and just added the white and yellow vinyl to the front.  I also lined the inside with felt so that the dolls didn't get as bumped around and so that it's a bit quieter

Craft Day

When I was younger, my mom would get together with her mom and sisters and have a craft day in December that lasted ALL DAY.  Once I was in college, they decided to let their daughters join in.  So it's been a few years now and our group is growing - my grandma, aunts, mom, sister, and girl cousins and the girls that are married/dating my brothers and boy cousins. 

We get to have fun crafts and eat yummy snacks/goodies all day.  Here are a couple of the crafts that we did - different people in the group teach us how to make a craft, or a food or one year my aunt taught us how to make balloon animals.  It's so much fun to get together and to see how everyone's craft can turn out so differently from eachother.

Winter soap - this was the project I brought for everyone to make - a different version of the Halloween Soap.

2x2 Simple Nativity - my mom taught this one to the group - I'm not sure where she found the idea, but she saw it online and found all the pieces at different stores and put together her own kits for us to make at our craft day.  Everyone painted their different colors or didn't paint them at all and left them natural.  It was fun to see the different styles everyone made out of the same kit.

Reindeer Board

I found an idea online here, and altered it a bit.  I wanted to use vinly for a clean, crisp look.  And I added some phrases to the board so Rudolph stood out a bit more.  **I know I spelled Donner wrong - typo - and I've fixed it but didn't feel like taking another picture**

I kinda lost the mood for blogging for a while and not sure if I'm gonna keep up with this blog much longer, but for now...my mom said she likes seeing the things I've made, so I'll probably just post pictures and links to where I found the tutorials if there were any.

Custom Halloween Soap

I got together with a few friends, and we had a craft hour.  We made these soap bottles for Halloween.

We found the idea here, using the printout from Eighteen25.  But I cut them out of vinyl instead of printing on a transparency.  Instead of gluing the spider to the outside, we ended up putting them inside the bottle so they kinda floated - giving that extra 3D creepiness.

Autumn blocks

I made a "summer" version last year like this and decided to try an "autumn" one.  Me and a friend had a craft/play date (hi Megan!!) where we crafted and the kids played.  We only got the blocks painted and paper cut out before we had to stop for nap times, so we both finished them up at home.  Here are mine:

I cut the wood blocks to random sizes (the tallest is 5.25") and the whole thing ends up being about 22" long.  And then I just sized the letters in Sure Cuts-A-Lot to fit the blocks. 

Font used:  Pharmacy (found on dafont.com)

Halloween Stacker

I've always liked the stackers tied with ribbon, but I never made one before.  Here's my first attempt at one - and just in time for Halloween

I cut 2x2's into 4", 5", and 6" lengths, painted them and mod podged paper down.

I always like it when people list the fonts they used so I can try and recreate things... so here they are:

Spiders - FrankenDork
Candy Corn - Mail Ray Stuff
Pumpkins - Harrington

My favorite free font site is http://www.dafont.com/.  I like that you can type what your sample text into the text field so that as your searching for fonts, it will display your words in the selected text as they would look on your project.

Pumpkin and Ghost bottles

I found this on Pinterest . . . but one problem - I don't drink wine.  So I called around and found some people I know that do or have neighbors that do and they saved me some for this project.

I had to use baby oil to get all the labels off (since I don't have Goo Gone - I know, who doesn't have goo gone?)  And then I spray painted the green bottle orange (after taping off the top for the stem).  And I didn't want a clear ghost, so I used Rustoleum's Frosted Glass spray to foggy it up a bit.

I cut the faces out of vinyl.  Still not sure if I am liking the ghost faces, but it's tricky to get a ghost face to not just look like 3 circles/ovals.  I wanted a smaller ghost, so I cleaned out our soy sauce for that one.  But the neck of the bottle isn't as pretty as the wine bottle was.

Vinyl Embellished Toddler Rocking Chairs

My parents get each grandkid a toddler rocking chair around their 1st - 2nd birthday timeframes.  They paint them all cute too!  With my son's, I added vinyl to it before I ever got a cricut... I cut it out with an exacto knife!  Took forever!

But with my daughter's and my nephew's (who are only about a week apart) I cut it out with the Cricut - way easier.

Here's my daughter's chair - front and back... I used the butterfly trail dots to go down the railing.

Here's my nephew's chair - front and back...

And here's both my kids in their rocking chairs.  They don't usually last very long out in the living room.  The chairs are in "toy time-out" a lot - hidden in my room since Emeree likes to stand on it to rock back and forth.  So hopefully soon she will be safer with it and they can be out more often.  Cause they sure do look cute in those chairs!

"land that I love" frame

Another awesome idea from Eighteen25. . . but I don't have a silhouette to easily get the country image from :(

I love my Cricut, but I wish they were as tech savy as silhouette. . . with an image library instead of expensive cartridges.  Luckily, I have figured out how to import images that I drew into Sure Cuts A Lot and cut it on my Cricut . . . it took me about an hour to trace and draw this image from a map.  And since I'm sooooo nice, anyone who has a cricut (AND the SCAL software) just has to download this SVG file and then import it.

Click here to download - usa.svg

And here's a screen shot of how to upload the file.  Just open your SCAL software and . . .

Aside from drawing the image and waiting for the painted frame to dry, this project took maybe 2 minutes to assemble.  Awesome!

2x2 Wood Firecrackers

I found these while blog hopping and went to my wood stash and immediately marked them to cut...my husband is my designated wood cutter nowadays since I almost cut my finger off making wood clovers in March.  So I had to wait till he got home from work to finish these.

I cut my 2x2's at 4.5", 6", and 7.5" for those who want dimensions.

I used a mixture of vinyl and painting to get the details.  I used the outside of the vinly for the USA letters as a stencil and painted in the letters with blue paint on the cream firecracker since the vinyl wouldn't show up on that light of paint. 

I attached my rope differently since I didn't want the tail exposed at the top, and I wanted it to stick straight up.  So....I hammered a thin nail through the top of each block and pulled the nail out.  Then I found a long pin and threaded it through the rope piece and stuck it in the hole.  So the pin holds it upright and no exposed tail.

I made 2 sets - one for the mantle and one for the shelf by the entryway.

Valentine's Blocks

I knew I was going to make these the second I saw them.  Pretty much anything from Brown Paper Packages makes it to my "to-do-list"

I had left over 4x4 posts from the Seasonal Word Blocks, and didn't know what I was going to do with them...

I LOVE them!!!