Getting Crafty

I love crafts! I love creating whether it is sewing, paper crafts, drawing or digital design - I just love crafting and creating. Do you know what I love even more? Searching online for more brilliant ideas. Ha! But I have a confession to make. I have a mental list of what must be hundreds of "things to make", a fairly large stack of half-completed projects and probably an even larger pile of materials I purchased for certain projects but never even started!!

For 2012 I decided to set a goal of completing one project each month. I will not buy any materials for any project until I know I am going to sit down, start and finish the project. Well, it is February (already?!?!?) so theoretically I should be on my second project. Unfortunately my January project has not quite been completed. And yes, I went against the rules and bought all the materials, but actually I have a good excuse for not completing it yet and that is I, as well as both of the girls, got sick the week after I bought all of my materials. And then February arrived and I knew I needed to get the February project(s) done in a more  timely manner since they are Valentine's related.

Okay, enough of the rambling, the whole point of this post was supposed to be sharing my COMPLETED February projects.

Project #1 - Valentine Shirts for the Girls

When I saw this idea in my Family Fun magazine I knew I wanted to try these Adoily-able t-shirts for the girls. And here they are:

Projects 2 & 3: Valentine Cards (for Samantha's PMO friends)

One morning a week Samantha attends our church's Parents Morning Out, a cooperative childcare program. Samantha and I worked on her cards for her friends today. I wanted to keep them fairly simple. Samantha does not have the attention span to sit and color for too long or really sit and do anything for more than 10 minutes. Both of these projects were simple and took very little time for me to assemble.

Butterfly Tootsie Roll Pops - I found a template online here so these were a quick cinch. I printed them out, cut them out, inserted the tootsie roll pop and glued on some squiggly eyes.

Heart Crayons - These were super simple too but a little more time consuming with the prep work. We've been collecting our broken crayons for a while now but peeling the paper off these suckers is no easy task. Samantha seems to enjoy tearing the paper off crayons when I don't particularly want her to. I figured this would be the perfect job for her.

She did not disappoint. She sat for quite a while peeling her little heart out. After all the crayons were naked of paper I had to cut them all up into little pieces. I skipped this step the last time I made crayons and they did not turn out very well. My last batch of crayons, Gingerbread ones at Christmas, had huge chunks of un-melted crayons because the pieces had not started out the same size. Trust me, do not skip this step!!

This time the crayons turned out with much better results. The only thing I wish I could change is the color. I wish we had had more reds and pinks and purples but we had a lot of dark blues and even browns. I would have preferred them to be a little more vibrant and cheerful.

Not too bad for one afternoon! Gabrielle still needs to make her Valentines but since she loves crafting as much (maybe even more than) me I won't have nearly as much work to do on those. Maybe I'll finally get around to making my January project while she works on her Valentines this weekend.