after taking inventory, we ended up with more ornaments than we realized… wow, that batch of dough didn’t seem like it’d make this many!

we got out some materials for decorating these cute canvases. we had a palette of acrylics left over from another project that we had to use up, and we also got out our acrylic metallic paints (love the sparkle!) and some stamps and stamp pads.

N was interested in the paints, and had a great time applying every color of the rainbow on the ornaments.

i stamped some of the ornaments to attach them to holiday gifts. (N only wanted to paint.) the ink took a while to dry, but they turned out pretty cute.

stamps + baker's twine = sweet

N’s painted beauties were a colorful delight!

we were intending to give these to her friends, but at this point, i’m honestly not sure that she’ll part with any of these. (do your kids hoard the stuff they initially make as gifts? maybe this is a phase…?)

we have a lot more ornament ideas up our sleeves, so stay tuned for those… and we’ll see how the gifting of these turns out, but our friends may have to come visit our overly-accessorized tree to see these in person unless N gets into the christmas spirit sometime soon.

what types of ornaments are you making this year?

creating handmade treats for little ones is right up my alley. because i have a bunch of random materials overflowing out of our art cabinet, i decided to donate not only our time, but also the materials to create some prizes.

mostly, we created pom pom/felted wool acorns, painted and wax-sealed wooden toys of all shapes, and some mini-pinecone fairies. we had a great time this weekend, as a family, making all sorts of fun little things together from the mish-mash of stuff that was bursting (avalanche style) out of our art stash.

i wasn’t sure if these little tokens would be “big enough” prizes until N confirmed that she’d LOVE to win a wooden heart and a wooden apple if she played a game. and she LOVED these weird looking gnomes i designed from the wooden shape that’s supposed to be a carrot. whew! kids are easy to please…

N even helped to paint a few gnomes

one of my favorite adaptations of the weekend was how we morphed our pinecone fairies from 2009 — this time instead of garlic peel wings (one of my fav art materials!) we used these wooden mustache shapes from our collection of odd wooden doodads for more durable wings. they turned out to be pretty cute with their acorn hats.

i love how each of us got in on the action and created these teeny treats for the kids at school. i spent much of the weekend creating holiday gifts for friends and family, too. i’m launching into total handmade holiday elf mode over here, and it’s not even thanksgiving!

i just put out four colors this time: magenta, turquoise, yellow, and purple. (the first three are a variation on primary colors that i just heart, and they mix to create beautiful combos! purple wasn’t even necessary, but it’s N’s favorite, soooo….)

free art play! these are the afternoons i live for. we did tons of experimenting with techniques — such as white crayon resist:

wet on wet watercoloring (saturate your paper first with water, then paint or drop colors onto it and watch them spread like magic):

sprinkling salt onto the painted page and watching the paint gather toward the crystals to create a stippled effect:

then we did N’s favorite method – squirted elmer’s glue onto the page, covered it with salt, and watched the paint get soaked up by the lines and blend into rainbowy goodness:

we played quite a bit. we even busted out the shaving cream at the end and did some paper marbling with the remaining paint in the jars. (because i hate to waste gorgeous paint and just have to use it up!) we did this over two years ago on the blog when N was just a wee thing, so check out that post for the technique. it’s amazingly beautiful and fun!

this day yielded so many lovely creations!

it was such a colorful afternoon with my sweet girlie and our favorite paints.

we felt like the color kittens! (do you know that old golden book? it’s classic!)

you know i don’t use the words “craft” or “fail” much at all, (for totally different reasons) but this is a complete craft fail (do i have to put a hashtag in front of that term? eww, lingo.) and instead of ___fail, i’d rather just call it an art-gone-wrong moment. (but yes, #craftfail!) i was inspired to make some painter’s tape resist pumpkins (like bottom left pic above) and three pumpkins with B O O stenciled onto them. i figured they’d be all beautiful and i’d title the blog “smashing pumpkins” and everything. i bought these super inexpensive beauties at a produce stand.

taped and stickered them where i wanted them to remain orange.

i grabbed some matte spray paint, and went to town.

(the only thing that was cool here was the caravaggesque lighting of these photos, and that was an accident)

after the paint dried, i peeled off the tape and stickers… um, and MOST OF THE SPRAY PAINT! (grrr)

for the B O O pumpkins, i thought i’d use these cool vinyl letter stickers i bought at michael’s, but large stickers do not stick in any sort of flat way to a rounded pumpkin surface, so i knew they would not produce a clean line when painted around. so i thought (sure, just for like two seconds) and grabbed some rubber cement and painted the letters B O O onto the pumpkins instead.

i figured the rubber cement would roll right off after they were painted and show the letters i had carefully designed by hand. perhaps this would have worked (???) if i had NOT USED SPRAY PAINT!

so i dropped this agenda altogether. i purchased three white pumpkins. i stuck the vinyl letters onto them as best i could. i traced around the letters with a pencil. i painted inside my pencil lines with sepia acrylic ink.

and it worked out well enough for this year.

pumpkins drying against sliding glass door - fun effect

and now onto designing the rest of the mantel…

i used much the same process in making this one that i used for the watercolor version. i printed the same silhouette (from photo i took in spring – see instructions on the father’s day blog entry) onto contact paper. then i carefully cut it out with good scissors.

after peeling the adhesive off, i stuck it onto a pre-gessoed square canvas. (this one is 12″ x 12″.)

i mixed up a lovely neutral cafe-con-leche-esque color of acrylic paint and covered the entire canvas with it, including the sides. after the first coat was dry, i repeated with a second coat.

once the entire thing was dry, i carefully peeled off the silhouette sticker to reveal a white outline of my daughter’s cute head.

i then sprayed the whole canvas with clear acrylic coating to seal it and give it all a shine.

we gifted it to my mom (N’s “gwee”) for her birthday, and she loved it!