paint prints for Christmas

the boys and I found some time after Thanksgiving to do a little Christmas crafting for their grandmothers.  this holiday season wasn't feeling much like Christmas for me for various reasons, but I really wanted to make these cute penguin prints and I think this project helped get me more in the mood for festivities :)

I picked up a couple of white aprons from Hobby Lobby to decorate.  all the boys had to do was sit still for a black footprint, and I painted the details on after those were dry.  the simple footprints ended up being a lot messier than I remember on past paint projects.  maybe it was the black paint on the white surface... I don't know.  they still came out cute.

we added some fingerprint string lights for a border, which I think really helped finish it off.  this was time consuming, but easier to control than the footprints since we went one finger at a time instead of a whole foot.  I added their names and year as well.

there's still room at the bottoms to add more, so maybe next year we can add some reindeer.

little fingerprints

we made fingerprint gifts for Nana's birthday.  the boys just love painting, so I didn't need to twist their arms or bribe them to help me make these.  they do have their limit on how long they'll let me paint their fingers and press them onto things before they try to take over, though!

we painted a cute ceramic mug I found at Target with Martha Stewart opaque glass paint and then baked it in the oven.  I bought extra mugs just in case, and I'm glad I did!  I thought a grey mug with mostly white prints and some color here and there would be cute, but for some reason the white did not work well at all :\  so I went with just the color paints on the white mug and they worked great.

while we had momentum going we did a picture frame with regular acrylic paints.  I'm hoping to get a good picture of the boys at my sister-in-law's wedding this weekend to put in the frame!

I was going to have the boys make a card, but decided to decorate a plain white bag that doubles as a birthday card instead.  this was a two day project...

but I really love the balloons :)