Guess what we did yesterday....?

Yup! We made this:

Holiday Ornament Making

This year Eliana got into the holiday spirit with hand crafted gifts, too! She and her little friends made some salt dough ornaments and painted them to give as gifts to the grandparents. Nothing like seeing your little girl get excited about crafting to make a mama's heart proud! =D

Ellie and J flattening out the salt dough.

Painting the ornaments at home the next day... Eliana painted them all by herself!

I think they turned out very nicely for ornaments made and hand painted by a 2 year old! I hope they were appreciated by the grandparents. I kept a couple for her to have as keepsakes, too.

Thanksgiving Crafts....

I did a few crafty things last week in preparation for Thanksgiving. Some of them were with my 2 year old daughter, like these:

Ellie and I also decorated some sugar cookies. We made these back when we made our Halloween cookies with Mommom and I froze the leaves for later. I actually remembered they were in the freezer and we enjoyed decorating them together, albeit with canned frosting and Wilton sprinkles instead of homemade goodness, but my energy levels were running low and I decided it was more important to spend time with my daughter decorating the cookies than it was to have them perfect. Ack! I think I'm loosening up in my old age...

And last, but not least, I made this little outfit for Eliana to play dress up in last week. It was an afternoon whim and it took me just a couple hours start to finish. And I love how it turned out!

I hope you all had a wonderful Thanksgiving week!!

Our Family

I believe in crafting with your kids. I believe in sharing your passions with them, and I believe in spending time with them. I think too often our hobbies are just that, OUR hobbies, and not something we share with the ones we love. So to encourage scrapbooking moms to share their hobby with their kids, I started teaching "Mom and Me" classes at Keepsakes. The first class was a hit, so I'll be teaching two more this time around. This layout is part of the first one. It's simple, but should be fun for even the littlest crafter. I decorated my tree with flowers, but we will have other punches available for the class, too, like leaves and hearts. I want the kids to feel free to put as many or as few embellishments on the tree as they like. You really can't go wrong with this one, so I want the kids to just play and have fun! Along with this layout we'll make two Father's Day cards as well. The Open House at Keepsakes is tomorrow, so we'll see how many people are interested in the class this time around. I, personally, cannot WAIT until Ellie is old enough to scrapbook with me.

Hard Boiling Eggs....

I'm hoping to dye some Easter eggs with Ellie today or tomorrow. In preparation, I am hard boiling eggs. Suddenly it occurs to me that I don't really hard boil eggs very often. Rarely, in fact. And I can't remember how to do it. So I'm trying a method I've never done before. I found it on WikiHow and thought I'd give it a shot. Have any of you used this method before? In about 10 minutes we'll see how well it works...

From WikiHow:

(Note: this method consistently produces a perfectly-cooked egg with lovely, all-yellow yolks--no more green-gray rings!)

1. Place the raw, uncracked eggs in a pot. Fill the pot with enough cold tap water to completely cover eggs with about 1 inch of water over them. Add plenty of salt to make the egg easy to peel later.
2. Bring to a rolling boil on high heat. Once the water is brought to a good boil, promptly cover the pot and turn off the heat {the retained heat in the water and pot will continue to gently cook the eggs without overcooking them and discoloring the yolks}.
3. For hard-boiled, leave the eggs in the water for 15 minutes; for soft-boiled, leave them in no longer than 10 minutes.
4. Remove from heat and immediately chill the eggs by placing them under cold running water or in a bowl of ice water to stop the cooking process. Chill for a few minutes until the egg is completely cooled.
5. To peel, crack the shell around the entire egg and remove.

EDITED: Well, no cracked shells, and I boiled 10 of them, so that's got to be a good sign!