Just Add Stickers

  Happy Thanksgiving! This week was very busy and eventhough I was really looking forward to hosting my family for Thanksgiving, I didn't think about decorating. My decorations were already up for Fall/Halloween and I planned all the food but last night I realized I didn't have an idea for the table decorations. Lately my table decorations have been interactive, giving oeople something to do when they're sitting at the table. At Easter I had coloring page tablecloth. At Christmas I covered the table in brown paper and decorated each place setting with the shape of a plate and the guests names.  I knew that I wanted to have some activity at the table but I didn't have any brown paper left and I hadn't bought a tablecloth. I found versions of the a Thankful tree on Pintrest. I liked the idea and I just happened to have the materials on hand.  I used a metal container filled with with green floral foam. I had used this container for my sister's baby shower and East...

This year we have official Halloween countdown calendars. If you've read some of my past blogs you may know that I am equally obsessed with Halloween and countdown (advent) calendars. In the past I have made my own countdown calendars for Halloween, Valentine's Day and a special countdown calendar to my sister's 40th  birthday! This year, before I had time to plan what I wanted to do, Hubby surprised me by ordering Halloween countdown calendars for me and Little Miss.  My countdown calendar is Nightmare Before Christmas and Little Miss has Halloween themed squishy toys in hers. Our new figurines make nice additions to our Spooky Town, which I will share here next week. Happy Halloween and Happy Crafting.

Happy October 1st! We are well into the fall activities around here. To make the most of the season Little Miss and I made Fall Bingo cards to keep track of our activities. This is Little Miss' Fall Bingo card, she wanted to spend lots of time outside, so her activities reflect that. We had a lot of similar activities, apple pickung, pumpkin patches and decorating. We decided that we would work together to check off as many boxes on both of our bingo cards.  This craft was a wonderful mess! Just like with a vision board, there is a lot of cutting and flipping through magazines and scraps of paper. It was a great time to think about the upcoming season and all the activities that we always do this time of year.  Happy Fall and happy Halloween month!  

  Over the years we have spent many weekend mornings crafting. It has been one of my favorite times to spend crafting with the kids. Last Saturday morning Little Miss asked Little Man if he would help her build a castle for her dolls. The two of them went out on the back deck in their pj's. They dug through the recycling and brought out lots of crafting supplies. It was such a heartwarming, moment.  Little Man doesn't like to craft as much as when he was little, understandably but when his sister asked for help with her castle he said, "yeah, I know how to make a castle, how many turrets do you want?"  This is their finished product, complete with a  drawbridge and kleenex box beds for the doll princesses. 

  It's that time of year again! Back to school, back to schedules and back to making lunches. This also marks the beginning of the 'ber' months. It's almost time to decorate for Halloween! But first, let's decorate for the 1st day of school.  My decorating this year was again, centered around school supplies. This year I made large pencils and a large loose leaf piece of paper. It was easy and effective. I made the pencils out of paper towel rolls and construction paper. For the large loose leaf paper, I used the flip side of a calendar page. I drew the lines and then printed the lettering using my cricket Joy. Other than that I used books and paperclips. The overall effect was good but missing something so Hubby added the finishing touch, an apple on top of the stack of books. Happy Fall and happy crafting!

When I was little my aunt would cook a big turkey dinner in the middle of summer when she got tired of eating salads and barbecue.  Similarly, I like to decorate for Halloween when the heat gets too much for me. Celebrating Halloween in summer aka: summerween is a thing in stores this year! I'm so very excited to see spooky ghosties camping and sun bathing this summer, it made me so happy!  One of the themes in stores this year was summer fruit as jack-o-lanterns. One year Little Miss and I carved a watermelon, as they did in the Gravity Falls Episode 'Summerween' and that was a lot of fun. I found this fake succulent in a watermelon slice in Michael's, I gave him a jack-o-lantern face and voila a spooky slice of watermelon (although, he looks a little sad because his seeds look like tears, poor guy.) Similarly, I created this jack-o-lantern pineapple by giving him a face (the mustache is explained below.) Hubby gifted me this ghostie nightlight from Amazon and it fit r...

This last June we hosted my sister's forest themed baby shower. I attempted to make the babyshower a surprise, she surprised me twice with my baby showers so I really wanted it to be an epic surprise. In the end I had to tell her to make sure she was there but I was able to keep the theme and the guest list a surprise. That was all worth it when she walked in to see the decorations, her reaction was priceless.  One of the ways that I was hoping to bring forward the theme was with the food. I wanted the table to look like it could be in a forest with natural accents.  Little Man was keen to help prepare the baby shower, my sister is his godmother and he wanted to help. He made this flowery foccaccia with vegetables and herbs from our garden. It turned out great and was delicious. For the party favors we gave out baby plants that our guests can take home and watch grow! I also know that there are some of our guests who are not plant people at all so I picked up some fake plants ...

This year we had two parties within two weeks of each other. One was Little Miss' 8th birthday party and the other was my sister's baby shower (which I will share soon)! Little Miss chose Stitch for her theme, no surprise there! With the new movie coming out there was no shortage of Stitch decorations and party ideas.  At first Little Miss asked for a cake in the shape of Stitch's face but I don't think that I have the skill for that. Instead, I found the idea for this beach cake on Pintrest. It was pretty easy to make and I used an idea that I have seen many times, I bought a cake from the grocery store and scraped off the icing and decorations. I used blue icing to make the water and Graham cracker crumbs to make the sand. I used Graham cracker teddy bears and fruit roll ups as decorations as well as little paper umbrellas and flamingo toothpicks. I was very happy with the end results, it was very summery. For our craft we decorated pencil cases and notebooks. I bough...

This is the last week if school so I am in summer prep mode. I love preparing for the summer, coming up with fun activities or a bucket list.  One year I planned to go to all the free activities in our town. A few years in a row we documented all our summer activities and made a Summer Scrapbook . This year is a little different, I am working full time and the kids are getting older and don't need the summer planned out as much as they used to. I still wanted to do something special for the summer, for them and for me. One rainy weekend this Spring we went to a book store that we all like. I told the kids to pick out a book for a summer project.  Little Miss chose an activity book for kids going into grade 3. She saw this page and she was sold. She loves math, mental calculations are something she is working on right now (it is so wonderful but she doesn't get that from me!)  Little Man's summer project is to write a graphic novel. He found a graphic novel of how to writ...

This past January I decided to change up my Just Add Stickers logo and background. Over the past 12 years of this blog I have changed the look of my homepage twice. When I look back on the old designs I feel nostalgic, I remember all the times that I worked on my little blog over the years, the projects that I worked on with my kids, for them and for myself.    When I started my blog in 2013, I was figuring things out as I went along. I didn't have a smart phone at that point, I finally got a tablet soon after I started but my first blog posts were made from my laptop, uploading pictures from my digital camera. I chose a playful option from the background themes. It fit well with the crafts that I was posting, very playful.  Then I discovered Canva! That was a game changer! I changed to this background on New Year's Day 2017. I was crafting more for myself at this point, Little Man was at school and I was working on my Etsy shop. I was looking at making my blog look a lit...

Happy Spring everyone! The weather was cold at the beginning of the month but we've had two weeks of warmer weather and lots of rain, perfect gardening weather! When we moved to our new home last summer the garden box was overgrown and we started using it to put our hedge trimmings in. We finally cleaned it out and added new soil  We were excited to try our hand at gardening again. Over the yeats we have had little  herb gardens  and of course our  Fairy Gardens , which are more decorative than actual gardening.  Little Miss was very excited to start our very own vegetable garden. She helped me create our garden plan and we shopped for the plants, seeds and garden decor together.  We had to make a few adjustments to the garden box. We realized that it was too deep to be able to reach the plants in the back, especially for Little Miss. We searched through the shed, which has a lot of  ceramic tiles and garden stones leftover from the previous owners. We...

  Little Miss was reading her Chirp magazine recently and we found out that it is 'make your own book day' on May 8th. That sounded right up our alley, so we tried out the make your own book tutorial in the magazine.  Little Miss is very interested in fuzy animal notebooks these days, so we made our own version of a fuzzy book. We used felt to cover the books. Little Miss chose to make Stitch and Angel books. We used felt to make the eyes and ears and used a black market for the details.  I chose to make a ghost notebook, I think it turned out pretty cute. You could cover the little books with nice paper or stickers. These little books could be used for daily notes or lists. They would also make a thoughtful Mother's Day gift.  Happy make your own book day and happy crafting!

Little Miss is in her slime phase right now. She wants to make it and play with it and she saw on YouTube that you can even make edible slime. So, of course I looked up recipes and I chose the one with the ingredients that I had on hand. I have to say that it was easy to make and Little Miss says that it tastes good too!  There are two main kinds of edible slime that I found, one that uses gummy bears and one that uses marshmallows. We used marshmallows because it was what we had in the house but I think that the gummy bear recipe would be more colorful and you might  not need food coloring.  The recipe that I used contained marshmallows, corn starch, oil and food coloring. The other variation on the recipe that I saw was to use powdered sugar instead of corn starch. I tried using the powdered sugar but the mixture was always sticky, the corn starch gave the mixture a coating that made it more maliable, it didn't stick to our hands. At first I opted for the powdered sugar...