Challenge 8: A picture’s worth.

            

If evolution really works, how come mothers only have two hands?

First of all, if you didn’t check out Katelyn’s mother’s day lanterns, you HAVE TO.  They turned out incredible and I can’t wait for next year because I am definitely stealing the idea for my own mom.  

Although mother’s day has come and gone, I still wanted to share the mother’s day crafts I used in my classroom for all of my student’s mothers.  It was a big hit, and all of the kids were really excited to present their presents to their fantastic mom’s.  

As I have mentioned before, I am a Pre-K teacher to 21 crazy students.  They are wonderful, hysterical, out of their minds, and entirely loveable.  They all have these incredible mothers and we wanted to put something special together to honor all of their hard work.  So!

First, we compiled a cookbook.  Each child dictated their best guess for the recipe of their favorite food that their mom makes.  One of my favorites was:

Mashed Potatoes

You have all kinds of potatoes. We have to cook them. Put them into a stove. You only need on potato. My mom will pick a potato with lumps. It is in the oven for 21 minutes. The oven is really hot. My mom uses clipper thingies to get the potato out. Then get a spoon and just mash it! Put a surprise inside-it might be tasty! Then mix it. Then eat it. Then go play outside.

I assembled the cookbooks with their recipes and a picture of each child next to their recipe.  And stapled them into little books.  Each student decorated the front cover.  

Then, we created flowers (because what mother doesn’t love flowers?).  We made tissue paper flowers, which are really simple.  Just cut tissue paper into squares, poke a pipe cleaner through the tissues and staple or glue in place.  

We also made hand-print lilies.  Trace the kid’s hand, have them cut it out.  



Wrap the hand print around a pencil and hold in place to curl the hand print. 




Cut out a leaves for the stem.  You can paint the stem (a straw) green, but honestly we ran out of time!



Wrap the flower around the stem, staple the hand print, leaves and straw all together.



Ta-da, hand print lilies!



Any mom would appreciate a bouquet of these gems any day of the year.  =)

We also bought these cute mugs from Michael’s where you can take the paper insert out and decorate it.  We helped the kids make fingerprint bugs to help decorate their mother’s day mugs.

And finally we assembled everything into a Mother’s Day Bag.



Hope everyone enjoyed their Mother’s Day!!

Mother's Day Photo Lanterns

“It kills you to see them grow up. But I guess it would kill you quicker if they didn't.”

-B. Kingsolver

This Mother's day, I felt I needed to do something special. And of course it had to be crafty. I started with asking each of my cousins to come up with three words to describe each aunt/mother and our grandmother. I ended up with a great list. There was some overlap in the words they chose, which was fantastic. After putting the list of words together, I used the free online program www.wordle.net to create a word cloud.

The word cloud created for my grandmother from the words generated by my cousins. I used a .pdf version but converted it here into a .jpg for display purposes.
But then I didn't really know what to do with it afterwards. It had so much potential! So I looked all around for ideas. And then a gorgeous one came to me that I just could not resist. It was the kind of project that took hold and you can't stop thinking about because you are so excited about. And that was something I hadn't felt in a while.

I found a tutorial on photo lanterns on Decor8. And oh boy they looked amazing. Not to mention the photographer there is phenomenal! (See right)

All you need: 

vellum

inkjet printer, with lots of ink

lanterns (mine are from Ikea)

Tip #1: You don't need spray adhesive I didn't have spray adhesive and I didn't really want to buy any. Another option was using Mod Podge to secure, but vellum tends to warp and bend when wet. I used the glass and the clips holding the glass up to keep my picture secure.

Tip #2: If you print on vellum, it takes a while to dry If you don't air each one out, it smudges. I learned the hard way.

Tip #3: Place the images outside the glass, not behind it (a.k.a. the picture should not be close to the flame!) The original tutorial doesn't specify which side of the glass the pictures go on.

Tip #4: Make sure the glass panes of your lanterns can be removed. Just sayin'.

I think that's all. The rest of the project is pretty self explanatory. Okay. Enough of the jibber jabber. LANTERNS!

After I presented them to my aunts, I received an overwhelmingly positive response, they were the talk of the town and I did have a couple aunties tear up with emotion. The words really hit home for those who put thousands of hours into the well being of their children but rarely heard kind words in return.

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