Just Add Stickers

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...

  Putting together a fast board of snacks is one of my favorite ways to incorporate holidays into our everyday. It doesn't take much more time but it looks great. This brunch board is a great idea for Easter brunch (lots of fruit to counter act the chocolate) or for Mother's day.  Small egg bites are a good way to add some protein to the snack board. My simple recipe is: Ingredients: • 4 eggs • 1/3 cup grated cheddar cheese • 3 slices of ham chopped Instructions: 1. Preheat oven to 350° 2. Grease muffin tins or silicone muffin molds (I used heart and flower shaped molds) 3. In a small mixing bowl, beat eggs with a fork  4. Mix in the rest of the ingredients 5. Spoon the mixture into the muffin molds 6. Bake for 12-15 minutes until the egg bites are firm I start by lining my board with parchment paper. Them add the veggies and fruit. For this brunch board I used blueberries, apples and carrots. I also made tomato and mozzarella skewers. I had some mini muffins but buttered...

Last week my whole family was sick for the entire week. We all had fevers and chills for days and days. One night when I was starting to feel a bit better I decided that we needed a little pick me up and change of scenery. I decided to take out our S-Patick's Day decorations out and make some rainbow hearts to decorate with.  This was just as much of a craft as I could manage at that time. I took out a stack of felt, scissors and my glue gun. I cut hearts out starting in rainbow colors starting with red and getting smaller with each heart. I used the 1st set of hearts as a template for the others. Once they were all cut out I glued them together.  I used these rainbow hearts to decorate the hutch in my kitchen, a space I love to decorate because we can all see it from the table and it is nice to change things up without changing too much.  Along with the rainbow hearts I made a 'pot-o-gold' using some decorative coins and yellow tissue paper. I am happy with how this turn...