A trip to the water park for Grace's Birthday

After our birthday marathon a week ago I needed a break! I didn't blog or create anything for a week, it felt great. After preparing for the girls' birthdays my mind was on overload! But I'm ready to share a few things! :-)

The day of Grace's birthday was also Field Trip Friday. Last summer we made it to the water park, only once (much to Grace's disappointment) in Wilsonville, she loved it and wanted to spend her birthday there. So we invited some of our good friends, Brynn and Jolee and we played at the park, in the water, had a picnic and got ice cream on our way home. It was a fun day!

Still a little in shock that my first born is NINE years old already!!

We had to start the day with a couple gifts, of course!

Grace loves fairies, so I got her a book about flower fairies.


When I asked Jilian what she wanted to get Grace for her birthday, she whispered in my ear "chocolate donuts and peanut butter toast". *my heart melted!* We skipped the peanut butter toast, a little messy to wrap but we did get her a bag of chocolate donuts!


The girls opened a joint gift together, Make Your Own Book. You design the book, mail it off and it is returned a hardbound book! They girls decided to write (and draw) a book about being sisters.



The water park!

It's Rednesday and I've been spray painting!

As you well know by now my favorite color is RED! This week for Rednesday I am sharing a picture frame I transformed from gold to red for our family picture.

My sister gave be this picture. I love Hydrangeas but this style of picture and the gold color of the frame does not go with our home. (I had my sister's permission to paint the frame.)


*Notice* Jilian "helping" me take the picture! :-)

Colonial Red spray paint by American Accents is pretty much my favorite color red and it can be found in LOTS of places in our house! At this point family and friends tease me that I have a "spray painting" problem!


I really liked how the original print was on a torn piece of paper.


So I bought a large piece of poster board. I tore the edges until I had the size I wanted. I then mounted our 11x14 family picture on the poster board and looked at it for awhile. Sometimes was missing. SO, I was brave and took my white scrapbook paint by Making Memories, watered it down a little and carefully (and nervously!) painted the edges of the photo. The edges were too clean before. After the paint was dry I mounted the poster board/photo onto the original mat and returned it to the frame.

Here it is, sitting on our mantle in our family room.




Be sure to visit It's A Very Cherry World to see other fun RED things for Rednesday!

Blog Hop!

Today I'm participating in a Blog Hop party over at Home Mom!




Check it out, you might just find some cool blogs and make some new friends!

:-)

Happy Friday!

Wordless Wednesday - American Sweethearts

Our American Sweethearts!






Head on over to The Miller Racing Family for more Wordless Wednesday fun!

Birthday party time!

Even though our girls are six years apart, their birthdays are only TWO DAYS apart! So, this time of year I am in party planning mode! I LOVE birthday parties and I can't help myself but think of lots and lots of ideas, tends to make me a wee bit overwhelmed but it is fun. This year, Grace really wanted to make her own invitations. Perfectionist me did pretty well allowing her to do so. :-) She picked the colors and theme for her party, a water party with hot pink and turquoise decorations and invitations. I suggested the design of her invitations and cut out all the pieces, she did the stamping and assembling. She even typed up all the party information. I think she did an awesome job! She's crafty, not sure where she gets it?! :-)

Craft Therapy

Jilian, my sweet baby girl is now almost three and giving me a run for my money!! She has been so sweet and easy going that I thought we might make it through two and three without many trails, boy was I wrong! In the last month or so she has been pushing the limits and is go-go from the minute she wakes up! Nap time has been mine AND Grace's peaceful time. Yesterday we both needed some "craft therapy"! Crafting is my happy place! I wanted to share what we created. Of course they are Forth of July inspired!

While Grace played a few games, I made these:

Inspired by some pictures I saw in Country Living Magazine, I added a few things to a candle holder lantern.

I'm not sure what to call the embellishment I made here. It kind of reminds me of the ribbons you win at a county fair! I made it by folding a piece of flag scrapbook paper like a fan and stapled the sides together so it would stay open. I printed a vintage 4th of July image and cut out the center. I added a piece of sparkly white ribbon and glitter on each gold star. Then put it all together with pop-dots.

I printed a vintage 4th of July postcard on cream card stock and mog podged it to a wooden block. I also, added strips of red card stock on the top and two sides before adding the red, white and blue striped ribbon. Of course I had to add a little glitter!

Added a few flags to our mantle...

Moved the metal Freedom sign from the office bookshelf to the red shelf by our front door.

I took a 5x5 white canvas, added a 5x5 piece of old glory scrapbook paper. I then printed another vintage 4th of July postcard and mog podged it to the canvas, added some bling and tags cut out of the old glory paper. It rests on a mini-art display stand I got at JoAnns for .79 cents.


Together, Grace and I created these Popsicle flags. We hot-glued 6 Popsicle sticks on to one "flag pole". You should really do seven if you want the colors to start and end with red, as the real flag does. We criss-crossed two Popsicle sticks across the back to reinforce the flag. Since I LOVE spray paint. We sprayed painted them white and then hand painted the red and blue. Easy and fun!