Family Dinner Book Club - The Day The Crayons Quit

I discovered a great idea of doing a family dinner book club on the blog, Growing Book By Book. I decided to try it out for the month of February. It was so much fun!

The basic idea is each month Growing Book By Book will choose a book (alternating each month between a picture book and a chapter book). In February the book was "The Day The Crayons Quit" by Drew Daywalt and Oliver Jeffers. I thought this was a cute and funny book! The girls seemed to like it, too. Mid-month, dinner ideas and decorating ideas are provided by Daisy At Home and Enchanted Homeschooling Mom (respectively), and questions are provided through Growing Book by Book. You can choose to do as much or as little as you want to make it work for your family. We followed the general ideas for the decorations and the dinner (some minor adaptations), and we used most of the questions this time around.

Here are pictures of our table decorations/setting:

Here are pictures of the making of our homemade pasta noodles (first time ever making our own noodles)! We chose to only do the green-dyed pasta instead of the orange and the red/purple as well. We wanted to keep it simple since it was our first time. Sadly, while we got many pictures of the process of making them, we did not get any after it was done. We made the alfredo sauce from the same site. It turned out delicious! We had colorful fruit, a salad, and some french bread to go along with it.

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Here we are at the dinner table:

#familydinnerbookclub #fdbc #growingbookbybook 

A "Dinomite" Valentine's Day

I came across this list at one of my favorite blogs I follow, Fun At Home With Kids. A creative, candy-free list of Valentine's ideas. I showed the list to A, and she chose to do the dinosaur and volcano one (I was excited myself to do that one, too). A is in two classes at school, so this meant 2x the number of valentine's required. This meant we needed to start early - I am SO glad that I did! All of the cutting and printing and volcano-mix making didn't seem too bad spread over a few weeks. 

Our supplies and printouts. 

Storming army of dinosaurs.

A pouch of volcano mix. 

Heart-Shaped Crayons

I saw this great list of candy-free Valentine's cards for kids on a blog that I follow on Google+. Within this list was an idea to make your own heart-shaped crayons. While we did not choose to do this for our Valentine's this year, I still really wanted to make them - what a great way to repurpose the broken crayons we have everywhere! After a trip to the local hobby store to buy a heart-shaped silicone mold we were able to try it out. S and I collected our broken crayons, peeled off any remaining labels, and then I cut them into smaller pieces. We distributed them between each heart of the mold. We put them in the oven at 200 degrees for five minutes (which was the lower temp setting and time that the person who's post I link to used). For our oven, we ended up doing another 10 minutes or so. I increased in 5-minute increments. You definitely need to watch closely - it goes from not quite melted to liquid in a flash. After letting them cool, we peeled them out of the pan and voila - we had heart crayons!

Before we put into the oven.

Our finished project. 

 

Heart Sun Catcher

S and I did a really simple, yet fun craft the other day - we made tissue paper sun catchers! I saw various posts around of how to make these (from snowmen to circles to other shapes).

We simply took clear contact paper, cut into the shape of a heart, peeled off the backing, and then applied small pieces of tissue paper to the sticky side until covered.

Ta-da!

I asked her to hold it up for the camera. It cracks me up every time - she literally holds it up. :-)

Her one lil' eye peeking through.

I used a hole punch to put some ribbon through so that we could hang them up in the window.

Starry Night Craft and Liquid Watercolors

I have seen a lot of blog posts about liquid watercolors, and I have been meaning to try them. I finally got around to buying some. I decided to try out the Starry Night craft project that I saw at artfulparent.com.

Supplies:
- liquid watercolors (we used blue and turquoise initially, then added in some yellow, green, and pink)
- star stickers
- salt (we used table salt and kosher salt)
- watercolor paper
- paintbrushes

First, we put the star stickers on our watercolor paper (I cut a full sheet into quarters). 

Next, we painted our paper. This is where you want to be sure your stickers are firmly on the paper before you start painting. If they aren't they will curl, and you will get paint underneath the sticker. 

Then, you add salt to your paintings and set aside to dry. As you can see, we did many paintings - some with and without stickers. The girls had a blast (and so did I)!

Once they are completely dry, you remove the stickers. In the cases where our stickers curled, we decided to leave our stickers on. Here are our completed works of art!

Memorial Candle

I saw a pin on pinterest awhile back of a DIY memorial candle. I really loved the way it turned out. I, however, didn't want to find branches or twigs to trim down (and I didn't want to buy any either). They also didn't really go into the how to of making the candle holder. I decided to do a Google search, and I found this post of how to do it step-by-step. I have been wanting to make this candle holder to honor my Mom for awhile now. I decided to do a test run using the steps that I found. I didn't do any ribbon or trinket yet like she did, but just wanted to see how it turned out. I had some lower quality images so I couldn't blow out to any great proportion, so I decided to do a few different square pictures on each side of the holder. I like the overall look, though, I am not sure if I had too much mod podge in places, or if I was to close when I sprayed on the sealer, but you can tell that the lighting is weird in a couple places - even more noticeable when the candle is lit.

Here are my test run photos: