Rock Painting

My current craft obsession is rock painting. Maybe ‘obsession’ is a bit strong. But, I did spend about an hour and a half painting rocks yesterday. So….call it what you will. Granted, Thad was painting with me and Thatcher was napping. So, I wasn’t completely ignoring my parenting duties.

My inspiration came from a few sources on pinterest:

The Hungry Caterpillar

A Martha Stewart list of rock crafts

Pet Monster Rocks

Obviously, lots of ideas out there. Thad and I test drove the whole rock painting thing by painting a few rocks like strawberries. We just used acrylic paint, then I sprayed them with a couple coats of shellac.

Some of them turned out really cute, and some turned out looking like twisted gargoyle strawberries. I won’t say whose were whose…but they went out to live with the real strawberry plants in the backyard. They have been watered a couple of times and even rained on, and still look fine, so apparently the shellac makes them waterproof.

I also plan on painting others for the garden, like these here to serve as little markers.

But, the ones I really couldn’t get off my mind were the hungry caterpillar rocks. And so, naptime project was created yesterday.

Not to pat myself on the back (much), but I think they look even cooler than the lady I was copying. Truer to the way Eric Carle does his illustrations at least.

Thad got bored before I was quite finished, so I will show them to him today. I am sure he will think they are cool. And if not, I will force him to play with them anyway. :)

P.S. Don’t ask me what my bathrooms look like right now. I had more important things to do yesterday. Like painting rocks to look like caterpillars.

Spiders….my fav

Once I start, I can’t stop. Random project from last month: yarn spider web. Free and easy. Spider made out of pipe-cleaners.

We even caught a cute little fly

Spring Holidays

I haven’t posted for a while, and I have been avoiding posting because I feel like I am too behind to catch up. I had stuff I wanted to post for Valentine’s day that never got done….little late for that. So, this may turn into a 2 month recap, depending on when the peeps wake up for the day.

What the heck, here is a fun Valentine’s craft we did. (Do you see how wishy-washy I am?)

The idea came from here, and it needs minimal explanation: pieces of chopped up crayon between 2 pieces of waxed paper. The instructions said to grate the crayons with a cheese grater, but I found it much easier to just chop them with a knife. We used way more crayon pieces than we needed to, a little goes a long way. Another tip: melted crayon does not come out of fabric. Fun fact.

And there you go. Our Valentines day. Bam. Moving on.

Easter!

Since we have had small kids for a big chunk of our adult lives, we don’t have a lot of holiday decorations, besides Christmas. I guess the reason being that I don’t like a lot of clutter, and decorations sitting places that can be reached by small hands tend to be messed with, destroyed, broken, and otherwise create a bother for me. But, I decided to let go of some of that selfishness and get a couple Easter decorations from St. Vinnies.

Cute? Eh….maybe. If carrot trees with eggs hanging from it is your thing, sure. Gaudy and weird, yes, probably. Nonetheless, Thad LOVED them, and for 3 bucks a piece, you can’t go wrong. Or at least not THAT wrong. Of course, Thatcher just wanted to eat the small pieces, so they were put up on the desk most of the time. But, it still felt oddly satisfying to have some decorations up to signify a pretty important holiday. Do rabbit trains have any significance for the true meaning of Easter? NO, I know this, just let me be happy about it anyway.

We (I) also did a Easter craft that I will attempt again next year using proper materials. (Side note, when you type a capitol I between parenthesis, it automatically turns into a lightbulb…..why??? How weird. Side side note, I’m not sure if that should be spelled capitol or capital….sorry). So, anyway, I wanted to make these cute eggs from this blog:

She used embroidery floss, I used yarn. You were supposed to use water balloons, I only had regular balloons, which were much less egg-shaped when blown up small. I also didn’t have much Modge Podge, so I could only make a couple, and they weren’t as stiff as they could have been. But I think the idea is really cute, I will make some better ones next year.

We spent the actual holiday weekend at my parent’s house, with one of my brothers (soon to be dad, woohoo!) and one of my sisters and her kids. My parents live in the country and have been foraging a trail down to their creek so they could take the kids for hikes. My mom also had the idea to do an egg hunt along the trail.

Day one: the preparatory hike

Day two: the hunt!

Super fun.

Family picture:

I guess I also need to mention that the boys had another birthday celebration while we were there, since Saturday of Easter weekend was Thad’s actual birthday. Ashlyn’s bday is right in the middle of the boys, as is my nephew Ezra’s (who couldn’t be there that weekend, miss you Ezra!)

And let’s make sure to represent my sweet Thatcher

Clearly it was a BUSY weekend. Hopefully next year we will have a bigger gap between our March birthdays and Easter, it was a bit overwhelming to do so much in a 2 day weekend. Okay, well I am still a month behind, but I better quit here. It is almost 8:00 and the boys are both still asleep. Probably should go make sure they are alive…