My most recent article in the Sandbox Press was for these great butterflies:

Bring spring inside with these colorful butterflies! Simple to put together, they are made with vibrant colors found on the pages of magazines. You probably already have pipe cleaners in your craft supplies stash and can easily round up some magazines for the butterfly wings. Choose bright colorful photos and your butterflies will get your family in the mood for spring. Depending on the age of your child, you can let him or her choose the photos and cut the squares out of the magazine pages or you can prepare them in advance.

Supplies:

Magazine(s) with colorful photos

Pipe cleaners

One piece of cardstock, or other stiff paper

Ruler

Scissors

Steps for each butterfly:

1. Cut one 4” square and one 5” out of your cardstock paper for a pattern.
2. Using your patterns, cut one of each square out of colorful magazine pages. 
3. Starting at one corner, fold the paper diagonally accordion style, making about ¼” folds, from one corner to the opposite side. Repeat with the second square.
4. Bend your pipe cleaner in half and pinch the folded end closed. Twist to secure it about 1-2” from the fold.
5. Place the folded squares in the pipe cleaner and twist to hold it in place.
6. Curl the ends to make the butterfly’s antennae. Enjoy!

Matt and I try to make a holiday card every year. Since we wanted to share copies of photos from the wedding with family and friends, we need to make a lot of cards this year. Lucky for me, Matt gave me a Gocco for my birthday and I had been waiting to try it. I should say, he gave me a Gocco for my birthday two years ago… but, you know when you have something special and limited supplies you wait to use it for something special… Anyways, it was a lot of fun to pull it out and learn how to use it.

We started with the idea of using a paper cut out snowflake that had the word Peace cut out of the middle… you can see it evolved quite a bit. Matt made a few snowflakes of different sizes that we scanned and used Photoshop to do a simple layout. I handwrote peace in the bottom corner.

Gocco works by creating a screen using a flash bulb. You then apply your inks and print to paper – it is actually pretty simple. Unfortunately supplies are no longer made, but you can find them on ebay and other online shops. Save Gocco is a great resource for learning more about the process, as well as seeing some fantastic projects others have made with their Goccos.

Here it is after printing.

The white and gray ink on the blue paper was nice and subtle – just what I would expect a snowflake to look like. In the end it took us a few hours, but it was a lot of fun and felt very productive. We needed around 100 cards for mailing, but we ended up with maybe four times that… This super fuzzy photo is just to give you a shot of our total card making process!

Eventually we ran out of paper, the screen started to degrade which caused the ink to run, and we lost our steam. I did post a set of extras to Etsy… we have quite a few! I’ll be bundling them as sets for gifts next year, too. If anyone reading this is interested in a set, leave me a comment and I will be happy to share with a few lucky readers!

Peace!

Tracy and I have a problem: we like to make gifts. We tend to overcommit and plan more than we can actually produce. So gifts come late. Sometimes 18 months late… but you’ll hear more about that specific gift from Tracy.

The first Christmas Craft I’ll feature is my homemade cards. They can be festive or plain. And made a great addition to other gifts.

Here we are in the midst of cardmaking with my little helpers.

The Owl Thanks:

Merci with a bird (probably my favorite!):

Christmas Thank you cards:

and Hi cards:

Here is a collection displayed on our table:

I also made envelope liners with scrapbooking paper that turned out quite cute! Sadly, I forgot to photograph them. But feel free to comment if you want to know how to do it!

Have a wonderful Thanksgiving!

Tracy & Carrie

I got the idea for this craft from my friend Micha over at mama:monk. She has a great blog about being a Mom and how it compares to being a monk. She can explain it better – go check her out!

She has awesome weekly posts called Thankful Tuesdays. I love being reminded to recognize how much I have to be thankful in my life. It keeps me from focusing on myself and all the things I wish I had. While teaching her 2 year old how to be thankful Micha incorporated the idea of a Thankfulness Tree. I loved this idea and made my 3 year old make one with me as well!

We started out with basic supplies: cardstock, a pen, glue and some scissors.

I cut out the tree from the green cardstock. You can draw it or trace one from online but I just went at it freehand:

Cut out your leaves from red, yellow, and orange cardstock. You may not believe this, but some trees have all different kinds of leaves growing on them! They don’t all have to look alike – unless you are a purist…

Next glue your tree onto a piece of white cardstock:

Then I had my son start listing off things he is thankful for. He then got to put the glue on the back of the leaves – this was very exciting!

I slapped on a label and there you have it – a reminder of all the things Ethan is thankful for. I hope this little craft encourages a thankful spirit in my boy!