Papertrey January Blog Hop Challenge

Hi!  Thought I'd participate in PTI's blog hop.  

The challenge: 

With the new year comes a clean slate along with many resolutions.  This month's blog hop challenge involves you challenging yourself to use a Papertrey stamp set that has yet to see ink or even one that might be collecting a little dust!

The stamp set I really wanted to use was PTI's Tiny Treats Valentine.  This is the first time I got to use this set since buying it after last Valentine's Day.  I love that the Tiny Treats set is so easy to use and perfect for kids and kids' crafts.  So my kids and I made a bunch of Valentine's goodies.

We made lollipop flowers for the teachers and my daughter's class.  This was inspired by Betsy Veldman's post found HERE.  Instead of die cutting a lot of paper flowers we used leftover foam flowers we had in our crafting box.  My daughter has 29 kids (we made 2 lollipop flowers/child) in her class so we wanted to do something simple but cute and fun.

The teachers' flowers have tags (tag sale #3) on them stamped with the images from the TT Valentine's set. 

Alternate views of our lollipop flowers.  These were so easy to make since the foam flowers already came with a small hole in the center for the lollipop stick and even my 2 year old helped to make some.

These are little goody bags for my son's kindergarten class. 

After I stamped the circles and cut them out my son colored in all the images and wrote his friends' names.  He really enjoys making small treats for his friends.  Inside the bag you might notice is a small heart.  They are actually crayons.  We've been making heart shaped crayons for Valentine's ever since I saw an article in a magazine about them.  I found directions online HERE as well.

This is such a fun activity for the kids!  They love to peel the paper off the crayons and break them apart.  It's also a good use for all those broken crayons we get at the end of the school year.  So I save them in a container just for this project.  I do put a label behind the heart saying it's a crayon and not candy, just in case.  ETA: My heart pan is silicone so it's flexible and easy to push the hearts out.  And I found that the crayons melt more evenly if they are the same brand.  The ones we get for free at the restaurants don't melt at the same rate as say the Crayolas.

I wanted to make little Valentine cards too with the stamp set.  When I saw the lunch box die, I knew they would make cute little Valentine cards or even for other occasions for little kids.  I used the limitless layers circle collection.

On the inside I taped some stickers.  I just cut a sheet of stickers to fit.  Next year, I might just make these for all my kids' classmates. 

I also made cards for my kids. Sometimes we refer to our kids only by their first initial.  It's a family tradition on my hubby's side.  So there is an Aunty H and an Aunty M, and so forth. 

Tiny Treats Valentine set has a favorite image for each of my kids.  So we all had fun using this set!

Thank you for reading and making it down to the end of this post!  Have a great day!

EOS valentines

Hello!  Wow, it's turning into a gloomy day today!  Won't be fun picking up the kids in the rain. 

The past few days I've been crafting pretty much daily.  I've been multi-crafting!  Sometimes I jump from project to project because I have to wait for things to dry or sometimes because I get distracted and want to try another project right away.  Sometimes at night I have a hard time falling asleep because I see craft projects in my head! 

I've been noticing a lot of cute crafts using EOS lip balm online.  I saw a whole bunch of Christmas themed ones and I thought shucks, those would've been so cute for teachers!  But it was too late so I knew for Valentine's Day I wanted to make something using them for my boys' teachers.  The problem I had was finding some to use!  I lucked out yesterday cause I found some cute pink ones at Walmart, and I guess they had just restocked the shelves cause there was a lot. 

This is the one I bought.  I just remembered to take a photo of it last night before I altered it.

This is what I did to change them up.  I flipped it upside down and just found a circle die that was just about the size of the lip balm.  I had to do a little bit of extra cutting on the cardstock to get the lip balm to fit nicely.  Then I cut the flower shape out of felt using one of my Spellbinders die.  I thought felt would be better so you can mold it around the lip balm.  I added some tiny butterflies to the top where there is some of the plastic packaging sticking out.  Added a simple stem and some leaves.  I had my boys write their names and then I was done.

Another view.  My older boy at first, didn't want to give his teacher anything but when I showed him what I made, he changed his mind and wanted one too!  Well, I think these turned out cute and were fairly quick to make.  If I had a Silhouette I guess it would've been easier since I've seen all those cut files to make similar crafts.  But it's good to make use of what you have.

Thanks so much for stopping by!

Simple Valentine's Day Treats

Hi!  I wasn't feeling much like creating anything too complicated for my kids' classmates/teachers for Valentine's Day.  We just bought some candy for the kids and cute heart shaped boxes of See's Candies for the teachers.  I don't know, I was just feeling a bit lazy.  But my older son wanted to pass out pencils so okay, I guess I could do something with these pencils I bought from Walmart.  Pretty inexpensive, I think they were 99 cents for a 12 pack.  So I remembered this post about making foam pencil toppers, see HERE.  (You should check out the post, she even used cookie cutters to make imprints on the foam to cut out.  She had lots of fun ideas).  Pretty easy and fast and quick, and I had some leftover foam from my Angry Birds.

I used MFT's heart die to cut out hearts in different colored foam.  The foam is pretty thin.

After cutting the hearts out, I just held them in half and cut 2 slits with my scissors that were just big enough for me to slide the pencil through.  So simple!

My son wrote his name on the back of the hearts with a Sharpie.  We made 20 this time though I know there are less kids than that because somehow he didn't have enough Angry Birds to pass out during Christmas.  I had made an exact amount of Angry Birds for his class but I think he lost track when he started passing them out so a couple of his classmates didn't get one.  Oh well.  So this time I made sure to send a couple extra.

Happy Valentine's Day and thanks for reading!

Valentine's Day Treats

Hi everyone!  I have a Make It Monday over at CC Designs blog.  Please check it out!

Thanks so much for stopping by!

Valentine's Day treats

Hi everyone!  I finished up some crafts this weekend including the Valentine's for my youngest one's classmates.  I mentioned before how I had bought Papertrey Ink's Love You to Pieces: Airplane and die set to make this year's Valentine's.  I'm still not very happy with this set and how it does not work well (for me) with PTI's coasters.

Because I couldn't get the die to cut the coaster through evenly, I had to improvise and use some thin chipboard I have that I usually use for the backs of the calendars I make.  Not really happy with using brown chipboard but oh well.  And then stamping on the colors was not so great either.  I wanted to buy new red and blue ink pads but couldn't get to Ben Franklin and so I bought a small square of each color from Walmart.  It was Studio G brand and it's just kind of bad.  The ink doesn't stamp or dry well and stains the stamp like crazy.  I actually soaked the stamps overnight to try to get most of the ink stains off.  So hassles!

I packed them all into bags with the directions that you can download from PTI and then made the tags using the stamp set.  Kind of bummers that I probably won't use this set again.  What an expensive Valentine's this year!  I just hope the kids can punch all the pieces out and assemble the plane nicely.  And they don't fly so that's not so great either.  I'll need to think of a better Valentine's idea for next year. 

Thanks so much for stopping by!