Happy St. Patrick's Day!

I hope everyone's having a great St Patrick's Day! We didn't do anything too exciting -- I had a path of "gold coins" cut out from paper leading from his room down to the living room where I hid his pot of goodies. It was simple and Go-chan loved picking up the coins as he went. The first thing he said when he saw his pot was "Football!" His daddy will be so happy.

Personal Family Squares

I made these a while ago and have gotten quite a few compliments on them so I thought I'd share it with all of you. I really love the way it came out and it was super easy -- I think I made all three of our squares in one evening. Granted, I stayed up til midnight, but still, it was one night.

All you need is:
Canvas (I used 8x8s)
Paint
Mod-podge
Cardstock
Cricut (or scissors and some patience)

First you've got to brainstorm! Think up some words for each member of your family -- adjectives, phrases, things they love, things the like to do, nicknames, etc. I had the hardest time thinking up words for myself so had to ask Mr. Cakes and other friends and family for ideas.

I really wanted the letters to pop so I painted the canvas black -- obviously you can use whatever colors you want to go with your decor. To figure out spacing and how big to make the letters, I cut out a piece of paper the same size as my canvas and just wrote the words out in pencil so I could erase and play around with it and see around how big I wanted which words. (PS, the big black paper at the top of the canvas is my "crafty" way of protecting my son's and husband's privacy. I couldn't figure out how to add a black bar to a photo.)

I then used my Cricut to cut out the different words. If you don't have a Cricut, then you need to go out and buy one. Just kidding (kind of) -- you'll have to use your computer to find fonts and print the words out, trace them onto cardstock and then cut them out. Or make friends with someone with a Cricut. Side note: I LOVE MY CRICUT. It was my push present/Christmas gift (our son was born in December) and it took me a while to start using it but now that I have, it's the most fabulous thing ever. It makes so many projects so much easier.

Once I had all my words cut out, I laid them out on the painted canvas to make sure that my spacing was right and that I liked the layout and that words didn't blend together or anything. I really tried to put different fonts next to each other so that there was a clear distinction between words and also tried to leave a pretty clear space between words for the same reason. When I had the words laid out just right I used my little paintbrush and Mod-Podge to glue the letters to the canvas and then gave the whole thing a couple good coats of Mod-Podge to seal it all in. Let it dry, hang it up, and you've got great, personal decor!

March Madness Bracketology for Toddlers

March Madness is a big deal in our house. Not to me so much but for my husband, who we'll be calling Cakes, it's like Christmas, New Years, Halloween, and Groundhog Day all crammed into two and a half glorious weeks.
I really wanted to get our son (nickname: Go-chan) involved in all the basketball insanity so I came up with a little toddler version of the typical tourney bracket. We've been working on shapes and colors lately so that's kind of the "lesson" I incorporated into the craft.


Hopefully most of you know how the NCAA Tournament works and what a bracket is -- if not, just stop reading this post now because I'm betting you won't be interested in making this craft.
In the NCAA tourney there are 64 teams (actually 65, but don't worry about that odd-man-out team) divided into four regions --East, West, Midwest, and South -- with 16 teams in each region (duh). If you look at our bracket, you'll see there are only 32 teams. I decided to start our bracket during the second round when there will be eight teams in each region for two reasons: 1) we don't have a wall big enough for a bracket that could include 64 teams and 2) Go-chan's only 2 and has a limited number of shapes that he can recognize. I gave each region a color (East is blue, West in red, Midwest is yellow, and South is green) and within each region gave each team a specific shape (we chose triangle, square, rectangle, circle, heart, octagon, star, and oval).
The idea is that, once the tourney starts, we'll go over the results of the previous day's games and Go-chan will be able to take down the blue circle or the yellow octagon or whatever shapes correspond with the losing teams and move the other shapes onto the next box, thereby keeping track of the tourney results AND working on his shape and color skills -- talk about multi-tasking.
To start with I painted some poster board brown which I immediately regretted but couldn't undo. It's way too dark. I had the idea that I'd paint the lines of a b-ball court as a background but then realized that made no sense since I'd be drawing the bracket on top of it. Anyway, next year I'll probably do the background in orange and paint the bracket in black so it reminds you of a basketball. I made do with the brown back ground and painted the bracket on in orange. Using my handy-dandy Cricut machine and some of my huge cardstock supply I cut out our shapes, eight shapes each in four different colors. I figured Go-chan will probably like playing with the shapes even after the tourney so I "laminated" the shapes between two sheets of contact paper and cut them out again.
Slap a little painters' tape on the back, stick the shapes into the outer boxes and you've got a toddler tourney bracket! Now we just have to wait and see who makes it to the second round, fill in the shapes with the college names, and Go-chan's colorful bracket will be in full effect! I'm just crossing my fingers that the Huskies make it far -- go Dawgs!
Jen