Happy Valentine's Day

Well seeing as it has been a full year since I have updated this blog, it only makes sense to come back with another Valentine's Day craft. This year's craft was inspired by Pinterest (of course!).

The concept was simple: friendship bracelets and a cute pun.

First of all I needed way too much embroidery floss. Lucky for me, you can get pretty much anything at walmart.com. Bonus: I didn't have to leave the house!

My initial hopes had been that my six-year-old daughter would be able to help me braid simple friendship bracelets. Unfortunately it was a bit too advanced for her little fingers, so instead she helped me pick out the color combinations for the boys and girls in her class. With the help of a great friend and some very bored teenagers at a Super Bowl party, we were able to create a ton of bracelets.

Next up was the actual Valentine portion. My husband has access to an Ellison machine at work so he was able to use construction paper and cut out perfect hearts.

My original plan was to hand write the verbage on the cards: Class would "knot" be the same without you. Happy Valentine's Day! Then I decided to print them instead. Basically I made a template in Word that had the sayong printed two times on a sheet of paper, spaced so that i could tape two hearts on each page. Then I simply used Scotch Tape to affix the hearts on top of the words and printed. Success!

I used an exacto knife to poke little x's on both sides of the card and then used the knife to help poke the knots of the bracelet through. Each kid signed their allotment of Valentines and then we were all set!

Happy Valentine's Day everyone!

happy valentine's day

ah, valentine's day.  i so love it.  i love decorating for it, i love cooking for it, i love buying and giving gifts for it.  to me, it's not so much about a day for boyfriends and girlfriends or husbands and wives to express their undying love for one another... it's more of a day for you to show everyone how special they are to you.  there are lots of different kinds of love out there, and i think its a fun chance to show your different kinds of love to your family and friends.

last year we did store bought valentine's for o & m's classes at school.  this year i wanted to try making something.  with the help of pinterest i found a neat craft to do.  i'm sure everyone with small children has a bag of broken crayons.  you know, the nubs of crayon that the kids really don't use anymore, but that you're not throwing away.  turns out we had a big bag of these (but not nearly enough for the huge amount of valentine's we had to make!).  all we did was melt down the crayons into some heart shaped molds and there were our valentines.  of course, it was a little more complicated than that, but the results were worth it.

the first step was to get all the wrappers off of the crayons.  we ended up having to use some new crayons since our class lists were so big.  o was a huge help.  we found that soaking the crayons in a bowl of warm water made the wrappers peel right off.

once we had a whole bunch of naked crayons, we cut them up into smaller chunks and added them to the mold. in case you are thinking of doing this craft, i would recommend keeping the chunks of crayon bigger so you have bigger chunks of color in the finished product.  some of our first crayons turned out rather... barfy... because of the crazy mix of colors.  i also recommend using bright colors for prettier valentines.

as you can see, we used a larger heart shaped mold.  these are actually for cupcakes, so they made bigger valentines.  a friend who also made this craft used ice cube sized molds (still of hearts) and they used significantly less crayons.

we popped the molds into the oven, set to 250, for 15 to 20 minutes.  once the crayons were good and melty, we pulled them out and cooled them off.  my kids are drawn to piles of warm laundry, fresh from the dryer, so it was no surprise that the warm crayon hearts had the same effect.

once we had made a million of these crayons, it was time to make them into the actual valentines.  we cut hearts out of construction paper, added a witty saying, and attached the crayons with some scotch tape.

wishing you a "colorful" day!

do you pinterest?

have you heard about pinterest?  it is, far and away, one of the most inspiring websites i've been on.  from food to fashion to crafts and kid stuff, everywhere you look you find ideas for things you can do.  i don't think i've drawn or crafted or cooked this much ever before, and most of it is directly attributed to the awesomeness of pinterest.  word of warning though: it is a complete time suck.  you start off just taking a look at a new pin, and suddenly your children are in college... or something like that.


one of my first pinterest inspirations to materialize was a gift for our wonderful friend's son.  he was having his third birthday, and being the boy that he is, is very into all things cars.  he had a car themed party, is obsessed with the cars movies, the whole nine yards.  when i stumbled upon a very neat picture idea on pinterest, that incorporated cars, i was hooked!


unfortunately it took me two attempts to make, and i'm not 100% sold on the version that i presented to "N" for his birthday.  there is a third-time's-the-charm in the future for me for this project.  basically, i used "N", for that is what the dear birthday boy's name started with, painted it to look like a road, then hot glued some matchbox cars onto the road.  throw in having a friend who works at michael's and got me an awesome frame, and we had a lovely piece of wall art.  yay!

my husband, being the awesome creative person that he is, decided he wanted to make the cupcakes for "N" too.  he found some very neat lightning mcqueen cupcakes to make and did a fantastic job.

so today wasn't about sketching, but it sure was about creativity... and pinterest... and cupcakes...  and that makes me happy.

i'm baaaack!

we got a kitten!


my daughter turned five and we decided the best thing for her (and our older cat) was a new little kitten.  his name is t. rex, or rex for short (or sexy rexy if you prefer).  my daughter named him after the dinosaur, as she is going through that phase where dinosaurs are AWESOME.


rex is a teeny tiny little nugget.  when we took him to the vet for his first check up he weighed in at a whopping one pound, thirteen ounces.  i attribute most of that weight to the pink eye, fleas, and kitty chest phlegm that all had to be treated by the vet.


it is so fun to have a kitten in the house.  you forget how tiny they are!  it also kicks your maternal instincts back into high gear, especially when said tiny kitten decides to barf in your bed and you automatically go to catch it in your hands.  ahh, parenthood.


in case you hadn't guessed, rex was the subject for this sketch.  his little kitten head is just ridiculously cute.  i want to eat it.  but not in a gross sort of way.


but, i digress...

sexy rexy, pencil, october 28th 2011

caw!

the other night i had every intention of sketching, yet had no idea what to draw.


i decided to enjoy some mindless entertainment until some idea popped into my head.  luckily i had dvr-ed "raising hope" which is an excellent, hysterical show.  i was always a huge fan of "my name is earl" and when i heard that there was another show from greg garcia, i was in.  


during this particular episode, amongst other things, two of the main characters attempt to catch a crow that is flying around their house.


INSPIRATION!


but i thought i'd rather to a raven.  they seem like the smaller, cuter cousin of a big ol' crow.  


side note: i REALLY need to take actual, nice photographs of the sketches instead of using my crappy camera on my phone.  but i really sucked in school when it was time to take slides of all my paintings, and i am also lazy.  hopefully i'll update all the crappy photos with nice ones... just don't hold your breath.

caw!, ink, september 27th 2011

random & inconsistent...

you might have noticed that i do not update this blog everyday...  it's not that i haven't drawn that day.  far from it.  it's usually because i have drawn too much that day.


you see, i have two small children.  they love to color.  they love to color things that i draw for them.  sometimes they make me draw things for them, then require me to color them.  


most of the time my daughter is the one requesting that i draw something for her.  today she asked me to draw a bunny.  then she decided she didn't want to color it, but that i needed to color it while she dictated the colors.  

she also likes me to draw dragons or things "that are sleeping".  i've drawn sleeping mermaids, sleeping princesses, sleeping ducks, sleeping bats...  today she asked for a sleeping tyrannosaurus rex.  then she suggested that the blanket be covered with other dinosaurs, because that's what t-rex-es like.   hehehe...

so while these aren't what i necessarily wanted to draw, and are not blog worthy, i did want to share.  the reason i didn't draw today is because i drew too much this morning.

he's a great hugger

in yesterday's sketch i made a little squid-like octopus fellow.  actually, if he was an octopus he was in some sort of tragic industrial accident for he was missing a few tentacles.  in any event, i thought he was kinda cute and decided to revisit him today.  

he gives good hugs, ink, september 18th, 2011