paint cut paste

just a simple little thing to share… one of novi’s oldest (well, he’s 3 years young) so, i should say longest friends is celebrating his birthday this month. for a gift, we decided to make a fun little frame commemorating their friendship. (they now live on opposite coasts of the country and haven’t been able to see each other in a while.)

novi watercolored an ikea wooden frame with her favorite color – purple. then we collected various trinkets, buttons, shells, her sculpey creations, some shrinky-dink designs, and other findings from our art cabinet, and set out to glue them onto the frame once it was dry.

novi drew and wrote a cute little card for him, and we framed a picture of the last time they hung out together.

happy birthday, v!

novi’s third birthday party was for pixies… that is, we did a fairy theme and all of her little friends wore their wings. we had amazing vegan fairy cake and cupcakes, made by the scrumptious bliss bakery. it was quite a shin-dig!

we had a lot of fun making the gift bags for the kids to take home.

our favorite thing in the gift bag were the fairy wands that we made for each party guest…

novi’s dad went for a beautiful morning hike and collected some sticks that were about the size of pencils, from the tall, magical sequoia trees that are woven under and over us here in the bay area.

then he sawed the ends of each stick so that they were flat, and we sanded each stick just enough that it was smooth to the touch.

next, novi selected special gemstones for each wand, taking care to decide which one was for which friend. we chose matching ribbons, and began our work by hot gluing the ribbons to the tips of each stick.

then i hotglued each stone to the end to insure that it stayed in place. not pretty, but it won’t show in the end. i found it to be easier to do the next step if the bead was secured.

then we wire wrapped the stones and sticks together with copper beading wire.

after that, we tied a feather to the end of one of the ribbons on each wand…

and abracadabra! our little fairies each had their own special scepter for making magic!

while we’re on the topic of personalized cards, i thought i’d share another little idea along those lines. novi will be turning three at the end of this month, and together we made the invitations to her birthday party. novi is really into fairies, so she wanted a pixie party where all of her friends would wear wings, so of course the invites had to follow suit.

i save all of novi’s completed coloring books because they’re full of little gems. she has a fairy coloring book that she completed in the fall, so we pulled this one out and selected a few fairies from it – one for each of her friends. we cut them out and glued them to blank cards with a glue stick.

i typed up the party details and glued them to the inside. (photo retouched to remove our personal info, of course.)

a super simple idea… but just a reminder that you can repurpose those coloring book pictures into invitations, greeting cards, stationery, wrapping paper, and all sorts of sweet artsy goodies of any theme!