It's Christmas! Day 20: DIY Decor

It’s Christmas! is a 25 day blog and vlog segment that I’ll be doing this December to bring you crafts, reviews, and ideas to make your Christmas season even more fun this year (especially, with this pandemic thing we’re all trying to navigate).

Hopefully, my family can inspire yours to not let this crazy year ruin the holiday season for you.

Today, we are making some DIY decor. I know this is supposed to be all about Christmas, but technically, this craft is not Christmas related. However, for me, it kind of is. This is a present that I will be gifting to someone. That being said, you could easily use more "Christmassy" colors for your sign and have it say "Merry Christmas" instead to make it a Christmas decor item. So, let’s get started.

First, we need to gather our supplies. We’ll need a wooden sign with frame. I got mine at Hobby Lobby. I used my 40% coupon and snagged this one for under $14. It measures just under 2 feet by 16 inches. We’ll also need some vinyl, a Cricut machine, some transfer paper, a hot glue gun, ribbon, and some greenery.

First, we’re going to make and cut the design we’ve chosen with our Cricut. My dad is redoing a home in North Carolina and wanted some decor for when he goes to sell it, so I’m making this sign to gift him that he can just leave there. The design I was making was larger than my 12-inch mat could handle. If you have a 24-inch mat, you'll be fine, but I don't have one so I had to break my design into two pieces before cutting.

I am now going to put my design on my transfer paper and then carefully try to transfer my design to the wood. I actually messed this part up and put it on crooked, but I did my best to save it.

We want to now add some greenery to the top of our sign to make it look nice. Since I made a sign that has North Carolina on it, I decided to use dogwood since it’s the state flower. I’m just going to hot glue it into place and then add a bow to cover our hot glue spots.

After that’s done, we’re ready! It’s time to gift this piece and hope it makes the home a little brighter.

Never stop creating!

And as always, from my family to yours, Merry Christmas!

It's Christmas! Day 17: DIY Gifts PLUS an easy DIY for your kids

It’s Christmas! is a 25 day blog and vlog segment that I’ll be doing this December to bring you crafts, reviews, and ideas to make your Christmas season even more fun this year (especially, with this pandemic thing we’re all trying to navigate).

Hopefully, my family can inspire yours to not let this crazy year ruin the holiday season for you.

One very necessary part of Christmas is gift giving. With online shopping (hello, Amazon!), picking out gifts for people is easier than ever. Most of my family have wishlists that I can shop from. However, sometimes, I like to add a little something extra. Today, we’re talking DIY gifts.

I have a lot of crafting hobbies, but my main one is crochet. Here are the gifts I made for people this year.
I made a pocket shawl for my mother-in-law.

A couple cherry pie pot holders for my parents.

An astronaut for my son.

A Mandolorean ornament for my husband.

A small Dobby (you know, from Harry Potter) for a Secret Santa gift.

And Ron Weasley (again, from Harry Potter) for another Secret Santa gift.

My husband and I have recently gotten into 3D printing in the past year, so we made a couple gifts with that this year, too.
For my Secret Santa gift, I made a Ravenclaw bookmark and a spinning deathly hallows pendant.

I also made a Gryffindor bookmark for my other Secret Santa gift.

I plan to make a couple more things before Christmas, but I'm almost out of time!

Now, for the reason you’re really here, my son and I are going to show you how to make an awesome DIY gift that he made for his grandma and grandpa.

We made candle art! First, you need to cut a piece of tissue paper that just fits on your candle.
Then, draw whatever you want on this piece of tissue paper with markers. I had my son think about things his grandparents like and things he likes to do with them.

When you're done coloring, cut a piece of wax paper that fits around your candle, but is about 6 inches longer.
Put your tissue paper in place on the candle, wrap the wax paper around it, and hold onto that extra bit of wax paper while you carefully use a hairdryer to melt the tissue paper into the candle.

Not all gifts need to be bought from a store. They mean so much more and I get so much more excited to give them when I've put time and effort into the gift. Seriously! Try it!

As always, from my family to yours, Merry Christmas!

It's Christmas! Day 9: Make Paper Snowflakes

It’s Christmas! is a 25 day blog and vlog segment that I’ll be doing this December to bring you crafts, reviews, and ideas to make your Christmas season even more fun this year (especially, with this pandemic thing we’re all trying to navigate).

Hopefully, my family can inspire yours to not let this crazy year ruin the holiday season for you.

Today, we have a simple craft that anyone can do. And it doesn’t require anything you don’t already have at home. We’re making paper snowflakes!

First, we’re going to gather our supplies. We’ll need plain white paper (cut into a square) and scissors. That’s it!

Now, if you’re not feeling very creative, do a quick google search to find a snowflake template to print out. We have a couple here that we’re going to do. Plus, we’re going to make some of our own as well.

Our first step is to fold our paper. There are a couple different ways to do this, but today, we’re going to fold our paper in half diagonally. Then, we’re going to fold it in half diagonally again. Now, we’re going to fold it into thirds. The last thing we need to do is snip off these top pieces to make it flat across the top.

Now it’s time to start cutting our design! You can literally do anything here. We looked up a couple designs for some and just went crazy with the rest. Here’s how they turned out:

So go get cutting! These are so much fun to make.

And as always, from my family to yours, Merry Christmas!

It's Christmas! Day 1: Advent Calendars

It’s Christmas! is a 25 day blog and vlog segment that I’ll be doing this December to bring you crafts, reviews, and ideas to make your Christmas season even more fun this year (especially, with this pandemic thing we’re all trying to navigate).

Hopefully, my family can inspire yours to not let this crazy year ruin the holiday season for you.

This is a big one for us. Somehow, and seriously I have no idea how this happened, we have 6 different advent calendars to open this year.

Quickly, let’s go through all the store-bought ones we have. And by store-bought, I mean Aldi. All of our advent calendars came from Aldi this year. I, of course, bought the infamous wine one. Plus, we had to get the cheese calendar to go with it. I got my husband the coffee calendar (which is filled with K-cups). I got a calendar for my dog. She loves treats of every kind so, it just made sense. Then, I also got the craft calendar. Although, this isn’t a complete advent calendar because it only has 12 days.

After spending all that money, my son felt a little left out because he didn’t have a calendar all to himself. And he had a point. So, of course, being the extra mom that I am, I came up with an advent calendar just for him.

It looks like this:

Inside all of those bags are things like gloves, fuzzy socks, Christmas paper to write to Santa, lip balm, a bookmark, a friendship bracelet, a mini notepad, Lego kit, an ornament, stickers, a game, Pokemon cards, temporary tattoos, a 5-surprise ball, a puzzle, a shrinky dink button, popcorn, a snowglobe, a stress ball, lotion, sprinkles, stencils, hot chocolate, and a small framed photo of my son and Santa.

It was a lot of fun putting things together that I knew my son would love. I know that every day is going to be a blast this year, especially with all these fun things to do every single day.

The thing I love most about advent calendars is that they give a little Christmas joy every day and they help you celebrate, even if only for a couple minutes.

Now, go out there and enjoy every second of this wonderful holiday season.

From my family to yours, Merry Christmas!

Lukow Loot: Our Homeschool Rewards System

While my son and I are away on our roadtrip, I thought I would tell you all about how our rewards system for homeschool is going to work.

In most schools, they have a rewards system where kids can earn some kind of cash (it was cape cash and then puma paws at my son's old school) for doing great things. Then, they could spend that "money" on special activities like playing on the Wii during recess or eating lunch in the classroom or sitting in the teacher's chair all day and many more options. Sounds great, but certain teachers would NEVER give them out and some people would give them for absolutely no reason at all and for everything.

So, when we started homeschooling, I decided to do my own version. The biggest difference is that we have definite rules about how they will be earned. For instance, my son will earn a certain amount of "money" based on how much time he spent reading that month. That way, his choices directly affect how much he earns. I definitely want to teach my son that the harder you work, the more you earn. Then, he can spend his earnings on things like going out for lunch, special snacks, or a free-write day during Writing.

The name we came up with for our "money" was Lukow Loot. I then designed something on Design Space and used my Cricut to cut it out.

Now, they sit in a wooden treasure chest ready to be collected by my son.

Do you use some kind of rewards system for your homeschool? Tell me about it in the comments. I'm always looking for new ideas.

Claude Monet Water Lilies Project

With school starting soon, I'm looking back on our end-of-year art project from 3rd grade. I decided it would be great to look at Claude Monet and his impressionist paintings.

First, we watched this YouTube video to learn more about Claude Monet.

Then, we watched this YouTube video about impressionism.

Finally, we watched this YouTube video specifically about the water lilies.

For the project, I followed the instructions HERE for the pond part. I let him choose which colors he wanted to use. After all, this is all about impressionism. So I wanted this to be his impression of a pond.

We cut out a large shape from an old cardboard box.
Then, he painted it using a spoon. He had so much swirling the paint around to look like waves and ripples in the water.

We set it to the side for a couple days to let it dry.
Then, we made the water lilies. He cut out lily shapes and I helped him make some pretty lilies. He attached everything to his pond.

And, voila! Here is the finished project!

Making Coasters with Sharpies and Rubbing Alcohol

Here's my last post before my son and I leave on our roadtrip! I can't wait to tell you all about it! But for now, we're talking about alcohol coasters. My son and I signed up to do this fun craft at our local library. We showed up and had a blast!

First, we sat down at a table where there were white tiles laid out and there were buckets of Sharpies everywhere. We were told to color the tile however we wanted. Then, we should use q-tips and dip them into small cups that contained rubbing alcohol to blend what we colored.

Tip: If you want large splotches, load your q-tip with a lot of alcohol and make large drops. If you want tiny little dots, squeeze out some of the alcohol on your q-tip and lightly dot directly onto the coaster.

I decided to do an underwater scene.
In order to make this, I put all different shades of blue in the top 3/4 of the coaster and tan and browns on the bottom 1/4.
Then, I used the alcohol and made large splotches all over.
I decided to use the alcohol and a corner of a paper towel to rub off a spot to leave an empty space to put a fish in.
I made sure to let it sit for a minute to completely dry. The nice thing about alcohol though, is that it doesn't take very long to dry.
I looked up a couple fish on my phone and used those as inspiration for the fish I drew.
Finally, I added some seaweed and coral and a jellyfish to complete my design.

My son wasn't really feeling the alcohol look at first and decided he just wanted to make a Snorlax (he loves Pokemon!).
I looked up an easy 'how to draw' on my phone for him to follow and he drew the outline of the Snorlax.
Then, he colored his design in.
I convinced him it would look cool to add a background and then use the alcohol to add a dotted look. He reluctantly agreed.
So, he colored in some grass, the sky, and a sun.
Then, I helped him out by lightly dabbing a mildly damp (with alcohol) q-tip just in the background.

When we were both done, we handed our tiles over to a library employee, who sprayed our designs with a sealant. I wish I had looked closer to see exactly what they used. But alas, I didn't. They said it would be dry in about 15 minutes so we went into the library to look at some books. Then, when we came out, they were ready for us! Now, these coasters sit on our shared desk in our homeschool room. I think they're awesome. And the possibilities are seriously endless.

Tell me in the comments some other fun summer crafts we can tackle! I'm always looking for new ideas.

Taco T-shirt

For my son's birthday (back in March) I told him that I would make him any shirt he wanted. We were going on vacation so I figured a short sleeved shirt would be perfect. I wanted it to incorporate something that he loved so we made a list of some things that he was really in to. We came up with Minecraft, Mario, tacos, running, his echo dot kids edition, the Switch, Pokemon, and plenty of other things. We came up with a couple funny sayings that incorporated these things. But eventually, we decided tacos would be there perfect theme for this t-shirt.

The first thing I did was look around Wal-Mart for a plain shirt that wasn't just a single-colored tee. And I found the perfect one! It was a dark grey with green sleeves. I love the different colored sleeves idea.

Then, I designed a couple things in Design Space so that I could cut it out with my Cricut. I found a cute picture of a taco and added that. It was so fun. I hadn't really tried layering yet, so this was going to be a simple design.

I made the shirt for my son and now he LOVES it! Seriously, he wears it so often. It quickly became one of his favorite shirts! I love that I am able to make him things that he treasures so deeply.

Let me know in the comments if you have any awesome ideas for more shirts I can make my sweet boy!

Travel Shirts

I'm currently dreaming about all the awesome things my son and I are going to do on our 2 week roadtrip. I'm a little nervous because it's going to be just the two of us. Normally, my husband would be joining us, but he just couldn't take that much time off work so I decided to brave it on my own.

So, speaking of traveling, I made some cute shirts for our last trip. We'll be bringing a couple of these with us again so I thought I would show you what I've made!

Some of these, I designed myself in Design Space. I hope these can inspire some travel shirts for you!

Mailbox Makeover

About a month ago, my sister asked me if I could make her a mailbox decal showing her address. She had just gotten a new black mailbox after a snow plow had taken out her old one. She sent me a couple examples of things that she kind of liked off of Etsy. Then, her husband chimed in with "make it have a fox!" He thought this was very clever because they live on Foxford Drive. I wanted to make sure it still looked somewhat classy while incorporating the fun aspect of the foxes. I came up with a couple options and my sister chose her favorite.

This is what we came up with!

Before:

After:

I created this design on Cricut Design Space and then cut it using my Cricut. I made sure to cut two of them so that one could be applied to each side. Then, I weeded them and brought them to my sister's house. I used Duck brand clear contact paper to transfer the design. Here are the steps I followed to apply the design.

1. Clean the mailbox thoroughly with alcohol.
2. Remove the backing and position the design where you would like it. Use the scraper tool to ensure the design is stuck to the mailbox.
3. Carefully and slowly remove the transfer sheet. Make sure to pull at a 180 degree angle. If you pull directly toward yourself, the design is more likely to come off and not stay on the mailbox while you're removing the transfer sheet.
4. At this point, I lightly rub the design again to make sure it is really stuck on there.

Since mailboxes are outside (duh), I like to look at the forecast and make sure there is no rain predicted for the next 48 hours or so. If there is, I'll either wait for a better time or like I did with theirs (since my sister lives 2.5 hours away from me), I applied the decal on Saturday after their mail had already been delivered, put a large trash bag over the top and tied it in place using string. I instructed them to just take the bag off Monday morning before they left for work. The decal is still sticking nicely and they have the best looking mailbox in their neighborhood. This is such a simple way to add a little curb appeal.