Off to our fourth and final installment regarding the Annual Crafting Weekend.  We decided to make some simple little wall art. 

First we drew a picture (or letters in some cases) on paper.  Yes that’s my little penguin…. I like him, so I put a santa hat on him to make him Christmas-y

Then we transferred this over to the canvas.

Next it was time to get out the paint and get to it.  Yes – our fingers and hands had many colors all over them.  LOL  Nothing like getting a little messy in the name of Craftiness!

To finish them off, we took some pretty ribbon and hot glued the ends to the back of the canvas. Here’s some pics of the finished sets.

Not really anything fancy, more whimsy and fun I think.  We had a good time making them.  Renee’s “Joy” turned out better than mine I think.  Her dots were bigger and more uniform.  She did a kickbutt job on it!

Well that concludes the crafting weekend we had for Christmas presents.  It was alot of fun and I’m sure next Thanksgiving we’ll be having another one.  It’s a blessing to be able to spend time with your sister and then the added kicker to actually both enjoy doing the same thing.  We also saved ALOT of money by making hand made presents for our friends and family.  

 I think next I’m going to tackle some coffee holders I saw online and fabric coasters that are on the Martha Stewart website.  I’ll post pics when I’m done with both and link to the sites where I found the tutorials.  They look like a lot of fun.

Keep Kraftin’

Kandra

Originally this was one of the few projects that we wanted our daughters to do by themselves, but since they only see each other a few days every other month or so they just wanted to play and they weren’t too interested in ‘baking’ – which may be the first time they didn’t want to get involved in crafting or baking.  Since they were oh so preoccupied with Rock Band 2 and a hundred Webkinz in Katie’s bedroom floor, we decided to go ahead and do it ourselves. 

The recipe that we used is from the internet (we googled it) but apparently we forgot to save it.  If you happen to know where the link is for this recipe, please let us know so we can pay credit where credit is due.  It’s just 3 cups of oats (grinded), 1 1/2 cups peanut butter melted and 1/2 cup water – very simple!  First we got all the ingredients together and started grinding the oats (they basically became dust). 

Once everything was prepared, we mixed the oats with the melted peanut butter and started mixing it together.  If you are anything like me, you will wash your hands about 17 times throughout this process!

I found it a lot easier to mix the ingredients with my hands.  If it seems too dry, keep adding water a teaspoon at a time until it is the consistency below.

From here we decided we would just scoop the batter into balls and smoosh them down with a fork, similar to peanut butter cookies.

That’s it!  Now bake them in the oven for 10 minutes and let dry completely before packaging.  Here is what they look like as they are cooling…

Make sure to package them in an air tight container.  Of course we decided to paint our own – with dog bones, paws and hearts.  Here is what it all looked like when we packaged them and were ready to wrap them.

Some lucky dogs will be getting these for Christmas!  Hope you liked them and got some good ideas for the extended members of your family!

- Renee