Holiday Scented Soap

For Halloween, I colored our foaming soap orange.  Well I made too much, and we just finished using it all up.  This time, I made a smaller batch, so we won't be using it well into the new year *fingers crossed*.  I colored it red with 2 drops of food coloring, and added 1 drop of peppermint essential oil.  The whole bathroom smells yummy every time we wash our hands now.  The great thing about it is the smell does not stay on your hands for long, just a few minutes before it dissipates.  My daughter loves that the soap bubbles are pink when she pumps out the soap.

Advent Calendar

Family Fun magazine had a great Cone-iferous Advent Calendar in their November magazine.  We have a fabric one that I bought several years ago, but this year I wanted to do something a little different for my daughter.  Using their template here, and paper from a holiday paper pack I purchased at Joann Fabrics, I created these little beauties:

Inside, I hid things my daughter loves the most:  Quarters, tattoos, gum, coupons to redeem for playing time on the iPod, 30 minutes of TV, a special dinner out at her choice of restaurants, and a few other goodies.  So far, every day has been a huge hit and she asks the moment she comes downstairs in the morning.  When we open each cone, we talk a bit about why we celebrate Christmas. 

Be Thankful Banner

Leelou Blogs has a fantastic Thanksgiving Printable Kit filled with all sorts of great printables for Thanksgiving.  I especially loved the Be Thankful banner printable.  Being the crafty person that I am, I saw it and thought to myself, "I'll bet I can make something like that".  It has been a while since I used my Cricut, and I have been itching to make something fun with it.  I pulled it out of the dust bunnies the other night and came up with my own version of the Be Thankful banner. 

As an additional activity for Thanksgiving day, I think we will use clothespins to attach all the things we are thankful for this year.

Cookie of the Month - October & November

I forgot to post October's Cookie of the Month, so here is a quick snapshot of what I did for October.  I made Carmel Apple Bites.  They looked like little carmel apples down to the stick, but they were actually cookies.  Because October's holiday is Halloween, I included a few plastic spiders to set the mood and wrapped them up all pretty.

 My mom found this fantastic cookie recipe that tastes just like Twix bars.  Oh my...they are so good, I could eat the whole recipe in one sitting!  Anyway, they are called Thousand Dollar Bars.  The recipe can be found here on the King Arthur Flour website.  I wanted something cute to package the cookies in, and I happened on this tutorial from Dandelions and Dust Bunnies.  Perfect!  I made the strips a bit longer (about 10 inches) to accommodate the cookies inside, cut a large leaf from green paper and wrote out the words.

So cute, now to start thinking about what I will do for December.  There are so many cookie recipes to choose from!

Halloween Foaming Soap

I am always looking for new ideas to get my 5 year old to wash her hands.  We already use foaming soap, which gets quite expensive, so I poked around online and learned that you can make your own!  I have been doing this for about a year now, but still have to fight with my daughter to wash her hands.  I was walking by the bathroom the other day, when it hit me...why not make the soap fun colors?  With Halloween coming up, I thought orange would be a great color to start with.  This was made with 5 drops of yellow and 1 drop of red food coloring.  My daughter noticed it right away and this week she has been using the soap without my prompting her!  I may try scenting it next

What do you think?  What fun colors would you use?

Halloween Subway Art

I recently ran across MaryJanes and Galoshes and their great Halloween Window Subway Art tutorial.  I just love all the subway art I have been seeing everywhere, and I was inspired.  I just had to make something similar.  I knew I didn't have the right picture frame at home, so I started to troll the garage sales and found this beauty for only $0.50.

With no nicks or scratches, the frame was in perfect condition.  Perfect!  One less step I would have to do.  I recently got the Sure Cuts A Lot software for my Cricut.  Oh my goodness....what have I done without this software all of my life???  I won't ever have to buy a font cartridge again!  I downloaded several spooky looking fonts* from DaFont and got started designing.

Once I was happy with the words, I used my Cricut to cut everything out on cheap Contact paper.  I laid it all out before committing and sticking everything down.

Since it was too late last night to paint my project, I went to bed and dreamed happy spray painting dreams until this morning.  After dropping my daughter off at school, I used Valspar's "Frosting" spray paint to frost the open spaces on the glass.  Then, the hard part, waiting for the paint to dry.  After I lifted the letters off, I was left with a very sticky situation!  Most of the sticky part remained on the glass.  Yuck!  Thank goodness for Goo Gone!  I spent about an hour or so scrubbing all the sticky residue off.  When it was finally off, I gave the glass a good washing and put some orange paper behind the glass and snapped it all back together.  This is the final product...

I apologize for this picture, this project was very hard to photograph!  In the right light, this looks really cool, and I love that I can change the back paper to suit my moods!

* The fonts I used were:  Yard Sale, Juice ITC, Mars Attacks, She Creature, Lunacy More, Trick or Treat BV and Jack Lantern BB

This project has been entered in the Halloween Extravaganza over at The CSI Challenge

Broken Heart Band-Aid Box

Way back in the day when I was in high school, whenever one of my friends broke up with her boyfriend, I would put a Band-Aid over her heart to help stop the pain. My mother-in-law spent the last week untangling a 38 year marriage to my father-in-law. Suffice to say, her heart is hurting, and while I cannot imagine the pain and hurt she is going through, I can be there for her, to put Band-Aids on her heart to keep it from hurting. To that end, I decided to make her something special to hold her Band-Aids.

I used a plastic box that once held drink mix pouches and used Mod Podge to cover it in fabric.  I added a fabric embellishment to the top and ribbon around the edges.  Then I used Mod Podge to add fabric and a note to the inside.  After everything dried, I added a bunch of Band-Aids.

Here is the inside of the box.

I really just wanted her to know that we are there for her and we love her and will support her in any way we can.