There’s no doubt that Grae and I love putting together fun gifts for her friends’ birthdays. So far this year we’ve given several craft kits, a play dough kit, a sensory play kit, and a little artist’s drawing kit. This time around, we wanted to try something different – keeping in mind that the birthday girl is moving come the end of the school year.
There’s no doubt that we’ve been all about the ‘kit gifts’ this year… Since moving to Kuwait, we’ve brought craft kits, play dough kits, and sensory play kits to Grae’s little friends’ birthday parties, and today we added type of kit to our gift list… A drawing kit! As soon as the birthday girl’s mom told me that she loved to draw, I knew we could put together a fun and easy kit filled with items that any little artist would love.
I’ve always adored handmade gifts, especially when they’re from munchkins, so this year Gracen and I created something simple but from-the-heart for Bradley – a Father’s Day interview and portrait.
We started with an interview all about her Papa. I’ve seen a ton of these on Pinterest and we did something similar when she turned 2, so I just made up a bunch of sentence starters, read them aloud to her, and she finished them off. I was actually a little surprised as I wasn’t sure if she’d fully understand how to finish off sentences like this, but it was no problem at all. Some of her answers – like the fact that Brad likes to wear leggings and ‘makes her food….cereal mostly!’ cracked me right up!
To jazz things up a little, I gathered some inspiration for Daffodil Design and created a couple of mini buntings using scrapbook paper and baker’s twine.
While I did that, Miss G worked on a drawing of Bradley. It was her idea to retrieve this picture from her room since he was at work and she couldn’t look at him in person.
To put everything together, I simply tacked the buntings onto the interview and portrait papers with a teensy amount of tape, carefully outlined her portrait with black felt, then popped them into frames.
Here are the finished products!
Pretty cute, right? My favourite part is that she was just tickled pink about the way Papa’s shoes had turned out… Proud as a peacock.
Want to create your own but not have to start from scratch?
Download our printable templates here:
All About My Papa | All About My Daddy
My Papa’s Portrait | My Daddy’s Portrait
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Brad and I really don’t do big gifts for one another and haven’t for years (so imagine my surprise when a brand new MacBook Pro was delivered to our door in time for my birthday last year!), but I do enjoy putting together little non-gifty things to make celebrations a tiny bit more special. This year, besides Gracen’s sweet little interview and drawing and the annual daddy-daughter photo book I make for Brad (which sadly is still in progress), Miss G and I decided to put together a basket of some of Brad’s very favourite treats.
Brad is a true snacker, so loading up a big basket full of goodies he loves was not hard to do. Miss G and I made a list beforehand, then headed to the market in search of our items. Included was chips (Gracen chose pop chips), blue corn and flax tortillas with tomatillo salsa, pistachio nuts, roasted cashews, hot and sweet beef jerky, a dark chocolate bar, dark chocolate-covered goji berries, a big bottle of limonata, and a couple of organic sodas.
To personalize it just a little, we printed off these Father’s Day tags from Paper & Stitch, cut them out, and attached them to the different goodies using a glue stick. In our case, I really should have taken the time to make similar tags that used ‘Papa’ instead of dad, but this time around, this was just easier.
Gracen proudly gave this basket to her Papa today so that he can enjoy it all weekend long. Picnic treats for tomorrow here we come! ☺
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A few weeks ago, Gracen’s {great} aunt sent me this photo of a footprint butterfly flower pot and asked if Miss G could make her one. After some serious detective work, I believe that the photo was originally shared on Carol’s Classic Gifts and Decor’s Facebook page, but I could be wrong (please correct me if I am!) Though there were no instructions attached, the project looked pretty straight forward, we went for it.
{this post includes affiliate links}Here’s what we used… A clay pot large enough to fit Grae’s growing feet on the side, some acrylic paint, a few old foam paintbrushes, a black Sharpie (though black paint and a fine brush or a paint pen would be great also), and lastly, a matte spray-on clear coat.
Because of the potentially {very} messy nature of this project, we opted to do it outside with the garden hose and a pile of old rags nearby (and I’m thankful we did…things got MESSY despite my precautionary steps). To get started, I applied a thick layer of paint to Grae’s foot. In our case, we used purple and green (Auntie Judy’s favourite colours) with a little bit of white in the middle, but you could obviously use any colours you like. One thing I would say is that if you want the colours to mix together where they meet, you should probably help them along with your paintbrush while on the foot. I expected the mixing to sort of naturally happen when Grae’s foot was pressed down on the pot, but it didn’t (not a lot, at least).
We carefully pressed one foot onto the pot, washed it off, then painted the other foot and pressed it on so that the two straight edges were in the middle (with a small space between them) and the two arched edges were pointing outwards.
After giving the footprints a few minutes to dry, I used the Sharpie to draw a very simple butterfly body and antennae in the centre.
Then we flipped the pot over and wrote a little message so that Auntie Judy will remember who made the pot and when it was created years down the road.
As a final step, I gave the butterfly part of the pot a light spray of matte sealant, just to make it a little more durable. Ten minutes later it was dry and we had an adorable personalized gift that was both easy and inexpensive to make.
If you love making personalized gifts, be sure to check out our ‘I love you’ pillowcase, our hand-shaped ring dish, our clay handprint keepsakes, and our paper strip handprint keepsake.
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