2013 Gift for Tae Kwon Do Masters

Last year I felt that the gift I gave to our TKD master was pretty cool. You can see it here.  So this year, I was kind of stumped.  I feel like if you do something really heartfelt and cool, you can't just revert back to gift cards the next year.  I brainstormed and brainstormed and came up with a big fat zero.  I even scoured the aisles at Hobby Lobby looking for anything martial arts or TKD.  I couldn't find anything.  So then I thought, maybe a chipboard word that says "Thank You" would be good, and I can customize it.  I couldn't find anything like that anywhere. 

But as we were driving home from visiting the family, I thought of maybe doing a TKD word cloud.  You've seen those, right?  You can actually make them online for free on sites like Wordle.  Then I was trying to think of how I could create the word cloud online and have it print decently enough to make a finished art piece.

What I came up with was using 12x12 canvases that I found at a thrift store for $2.50 each as my base.  I love the look of the colors of belts students go through, so I wanted to include those too.  I used ribbon that was about a quarter inch wide to block off roughly 1" wide stripes on the canvas.  Then I used some embossing paste (again, found it at a thrift store) mixed with the paint colors I wanted to make the belts.  I did have some leak under the ribbon, if I had had some painter's tape I would have preferred to use that.

I made Miss Kelly's word cloud first, and I learned a few things from it.  The first was I made 2 purple belts and then went back in with white paint and added the white stripe to the purple trim belt that way.  On the second picture, I mixed white with the embossing paste and applied it to the second purple belt while it was still wet.  I like the finished look of that one better.  The other thing I learned with the first picture was that while it is easier to fit those last few words in with sharpies, they tend to smear when you apply the sealing layer of mod podge on top.  Also, beware of the helpful cat who walks through the embossing paste before it is dry.  I ended up adding little dabs of color throughout the canvas to make the mistakes Jack caused look intentional.

So for the Masters' (they are married and so get 1 gift) picture, I really had to work an rework where everything went.  A lot of the words were applied and then shifted if they were crooked, if I misspelled them, and if I used up too much room for a word and then needed the space later for another word.  I also depleted my alpha stickers.  But I love how they turned out and I know the Masters & Miss Kelly will love them.  Both of my girls attend TKD now and it's our family hobby.  I truly appreciate every minute the Masters and Miss Kelly spend helping my girls.

Gift Idea: 12 Days Off for Christmas

One of my very best friends is my daughters' daycare provider. She's been a great caregiver and as I've said, we've gotten to be really good friends. Once in a blue moon she'll ask me to watch the daycare when she is on vacation or needs to go watch her kid's programs. So this year, I thought I'd have a bit of fun and give her a set of coupons for days off from the daycare. Here is what her finished gift looked like.

I printed each page and then mounted them in a matchbook album using pretty papers for my mats. I also embellished some (but not all) of the pages with flat or close to flat scrapbook embellishments. The Christmas tree on the cover is actually an ornament I added brads to to make it look like colored ornaments.

A gift idea for Tae Kwon Do teachers.

My daughter has been in tae kwon do for almost 2 years now and we love Master Amanda. This summer Master Amanda married Master Billy Joe and now we are lucky to have 2 Masters. But now we're needing to give a gift to 2 Masters instead of just 1. Last year I made the cute little gingerbread men ornament for Master Amanda. Here is what I came up with this year.

Supplies included:
11x14 frame
2 12x12 scrapbooking sheets (TKD themed)
Scrabble tiles (from more than one game)
double-sided scrapbook tape
double-sided foam tape

To begin, we decided what we wanted the background to look like, and pieced it together to fit the frame. We used the double-sided scrapbook tape to adhere the pieces together. For the word art on the front, we had to layout our words in advance to make sure we had all the letters we needed. The one word we knew we wanted from the very beginning was TAEKWONDO. Then we tried to think of important words she has learned and settled on the Tenants of Tae Kwon Do:
COURTESY
INTEGRITY
PERSEVERANCE (yes I noticed it was spelled wrong in the picture)
SELF-CONTROL
INDOMITABLE SPIRIT

So we built the crossword using them. It fits just about perfectly. I laid it all out in the frame and then adhered the tiles one at a time with the foam tape. This gives them a little dimension and sticks really well. Having a gridwork on the central paper helped to keep them straight as well.

The finishing touch was to write our Christmas wishes on the back of the frame with a gold sharpie.

Elf on the Shelf Ideas

A couple of years ago my mother-in-law bought an Elf on the Shelf set for my daughters. I was super excited because I remember an elf that lived in our Christmas tree when I was a little girl. He had white flannel clothes with red pinstripes on them, but no one in the family has any idea where he disappeared to over the years.

We named our first elf Johnny. Last Christmas we adopted a second elf who had been forgotten in a box of Christmas ornaments given to a friend. We had just seen the cute movie, The Elf on the Shelf, so my younger daughter decided to name him Chippey. It seems like everyone has an elf now, I even saw girl elves available at Target!

Anyway, now that my girls are getting older, they are starting to doubt the magic that causes the elves to travel to the North Pole each night and then come back to a new spot in our house before they get up each day (it doesn't help that someone got out of bed one night and caught me helping the elves into their new spots.)

This year I decided to be a little more creative and started checking the internet. I have found some really great links on Pinterest for ideas of what kinds of things other families' elves on the shelf do.

Here are a few of ours:

Who's been playing in my jewelry??

The boys have some "me" time in the bathroom.

They have such tiny hands that they have to work together to run the PS3 controller. Now that's teamwork!

They look so innocent, but if they didn't do it, why do they have sugar on their butts and feet???

Use the force!

Graffiti is so naughty!

Wow, they really told us who's on which list...didn't know Santa kept a "Very Nice" list though.

It looks like their prank backfired...for Chippey at least.


Here are a few great ideas from my friends:

Here are some more links for ideas:
Picklehead Soup
LilBlueBoo
livinglocurto
LMents Photography
Mommy Upgrade
Clearly Candace

Vintage Wooden Ornament Wreath

One of my favorite things about Christmas is the vintage wooden ornaments that I was given by my mother-in-law. We have funny little gnomes that have furry beards and our cats steal them all the time. The other fun set I got from her was a neat set of spinning circus themed ornaments from my husband's childhood. I then went to my mom and asked for her old stuff. I was able to find a few miscellaneous ones from my childhood and I love the look they add to the tree. I decided they would make a very cute wreath, but I have no heart to hot glue our family mementos to a wreath, so I decided to start checking the thrift stores. I found a ton of cute little ornaments that look like they were produced en mass in Japan or China in the 60s. Perfect! I think I payed less than $5 for all of them (aided by my friend gifting me a blank wreath.) I sat down with the ornaments and removed all the strings and then started randomly gluing them on. I wasn't trying for a pattern or anything because I wanted it to look like a section of a Christmas tree. I could not get any of my ribbon to look good with the wreath and I decided to try the ric rac. Perfect! It looks homemade, and it looks like something done back in the day.

Homemade Christmas Gift Ideas

My daughter is a Tae Kwon Do student and this is our first Christmas at the gym. I have been wracking my brains for what to give the teachers and Master Amanda at the gym. I have been making some super cute felt charms for my Girl Scouts and I was thinking, what else can I do with felt? What I ended up with was:

This is Master Amanda (who earned her 4th degree black belt right before Christmas) and Sammi who is currently a green belt. I used my gingerbread men cookie cutters to cut create the "bodies". Then I made the deboks basically the same way, tracing them and leaving myself some sewing room. I sewed them together around the bodies, I don't think they would have gone on after I sewed them up. I added the belts and tied them in traditional knots, then sewed the two figures together. I added the date and Master Amanda & Sammi's names to the back with fabric markers before giving it to Master Amanda. I ended up making homemade lemon sugar scrub for the teachers at my daughter's schools. Here is the link. It was super easy and I had enough left over to give 1 jar as my secret santa gift for Girl Scouts and keep 1 jar for myself (I multiplied the recipe and ended up with way more than I intended.)

Homemade Christmas? Ornaments & Garland

'tis the season to make some holiday cheer! I have been hard at work on a few Christmas projects. First off, we have a yearly fundraiser at the library and I was asked for some ideas of what I would put onto our tree this year. One of my jobs at the library is to help sort and sell donated books. Sometimes books are in such bad shape that I can't do anything with them but throw them into the recycling bin. (Some people cannot throw books away, no matter how bad of shape they are in.) Apparently there has been a 'fall cleaning' mindset going on in our town because we have had so many books donated that I have no room to put them onto the sales shelves. So I said to myself, we're a library, couldn't we make ornaments out of old books? I quick search on the internet later and I knew this was going to be fun. I didn't expect the whole tree to have my "recycled books" theme, but the director liked the idea and was willing to give me the chance to run with it. I found inspiration for the paper tree topper at Great Green Goods. The topper is actually 2 pieces tied around the top of the tree. The backbone is a page from a very badly torn board book. I then made 12 spiral rolls of pages from picture books and hot-glued them on to the backing. Then I made 12 spiral rolled pages of old romance novels (which were about 1/2 the size of the picture book pages,) and glued them in between the first set of spiral rolls. To make a center for the topper, I added one of the fanned ornaments made out of picture book pages and glued on a sparkly snowflake.

The fanned ornaments were an idea I found on the blog Pinecone. I didn't make them with two layers but we did use the button center idea and the assistant director helped me out by adding glitter to the edges of the ornaments.

We made the cutest round ornaments that I found on the blog Craftside out of children's books that had broken spines. I liked this type of paper best, it is heavier grade and holds up better.

The last touch for the tree was to make a garland. I cut strips of paper about 1/2 inch by 6 inches long from old romance novels, kids' books, graphic novels and atlases These were randomly woven into a gumwrapper weave. You can find instructions and videos on how to do this all over the internet.

The final touches that really brought the tree together were the great idea by a coworker to use glitter hairspray to add some sparkle to the fanned ornaments and the tree topper, old fashioned strands of silver icicles and a random box of vintage glass ornaments we found stashed in the storage room marked, "Janitorial Supplies." I think the tree topper looks like a prairie windmill and so I'm going to give my tree a title: Homemade 1940s Prairie Christmas.