Month: March 2021

My mom recently gave me a decor piece that she’s had for as long as I can remember – a wood cutout of a crescent moon with stairs and banisters, and three stars to match. She told me that her grandfather made it, and I’m really glad to have it in my own home now (even though it’ll be weird going to her house and not seeing it anymore). Even though I never met her grandfather (that I can remember), it feels like a piece of my own history to have this, and I’m really glad that she gave it to me.

But… I’ve been watching a lot of Dollar Tree DIY videos on YouTube lately, and they inspired me to take this family heirloom piece and give it a bit of a makeover. As much as I loved the piece before, I really like it a lot more now. Here’s what I did.

I started with a coat of white paint. I just used Apple Barrel White gloss finish paint because that’s what I had on hand. I really like the feeling of the gloss finish paint, and it’s not so glossy that it’s shiny. It just gives a very smooth finish to your work. I didn’t trust myself to be able to put the piece back together if I took it apart, so I did my best to just paint into the nooks and crannies of the entire piece. The stars were a lot easier because they’re flat. I didn’t bother painting the backs of any of the elements. I like knowing that they’re still the original color wood – it’s another reminder of my ancestry and the man who created the piece.

I chose to put the phrase “When you wish upon a star” onto the stars, and I knew I wanted the word WISH to be on its own star, and I wanted that one to have gold glitter. Other than that, I didn’t have a super specific design in mind. So I got onto the computer and found a font I liked (I used Garamond in all caps for WISH and Princess Sofia for the rest of the words), then typed the phrase into Word and printed it out. I used the same transfer method as on my most recent welcome sign to add the words to the stars, then painted them with Apple Barrel paint in the color Cool Blue. When the paint dried, I added a bit of gold glitter glue to the WISH star and spread it out with my finger to cover the entire star.

My mom never put anything on the stairs that I can remember, but I wanted to utilize that space for something pretty. I picked up a package of 3 mini terra cotta pots from the Dollar Tree, as well as a roll of ribbon, some Spanish moss, and “vase filler,” which was basically some miniature gold painted pinecones and other random bits of stuff that matched. I used hot glue to attach the ribbon to the tops of the pots, right where the rim is. Then I filled the pots with the moss (hot glued in place for security), then hot glued some pieces from the vase filler on top. Each one is a little different. (There are only 2 in the picture because I wasn’t sure I wanted to use all three, but decided later that I absolutely did want that.) Finally, I hot glued the pots onto the stairs. I did this so that I wouldn’t have to worry about them falling off, but also so that in a pinch, they would be removable.

Have you ever taken a piece from your past and given it new life?

Blessings,

I created a new welcome sign for my front door this year and thought I’d share it here, including how I made it.

I started with one of the standard Dollar Tree rectangular signs. The one I picked up said “Easter Joy,” with the O being a foam chick hot glued on. I started by removing the chick from the front of the sign and setting it aside, as well as taking off the ribbon hanger. Then I flipped the sign over to the back and painted it with Apple Barrel (acrylic paint) in the color Nutmeg. When that dried, I went over it with white paint, allowing a bit of the brown to show through.

I also found a cute wood flower cutout from Dollar Tree and some pretty pink fabric. I removed the twine hanger from the flower and saved it for later. Then I used some Mod Podge glue to attach the fabric to the flower. When it had fully dried, I used an Exacto knife to trim around the edges of the flower. This works much, much better than trying to get close enough with scissors.

With both pieces (the painted and the decoupaged) done, I went to work with the words. I got on the computer and printed out the letters W E L C M and E for Welcome in a font that I liked. I made it pretty big (around 200 point, if I remember correctly). I had the idea to use the chick for the O, but that didn’t work out in the end (the sizing was all wrong). Then, using a technique I’d seen from Krafts by Katelyn on YouTube, I scribbled over the letters on the back of the paper, then placed it right side up on my sign and traced the outline of the letters. This left a very pale outline of the letters from the pencil scribbles on the back of the paper, which allowed me to paint over them very easily, with my painted letters looking just like the font I’d chosen. I painted the letters using the same Nutmeg brown that I used for the base coat on my sign.

I got back on the computer and found another font that I liked and typed out “to our home.” I printed that out and then very carefully cut it out with scissors. I used the Exacto knife to cut out the little bits from the insides of the letters as needed. I also jumped onto Pixabay.com (a free picture site) and found a pretty yellow background. I printed that out too, and then found a little bowl in my kitchen that was a good size to fit inside the flower. I cut out the yellow texture and glued that onto the flower using Mod Podge, and while the top coat was still wet I attached my “to our home” words and added another coat of glue on top of those also. I let the flower dry completely.

With my main pieces now done, I used a bit of hot glue to attach the flower to the bottom center of the rectangle. I considered putting the flower off to one side, but then I realized that it wouldn’t hang straight if I did, so I put it in the middle. I added the little chicken that I’d pulled off the front of the sign as well as the twine from the flower for hanging, and I was done… I thought.

I hung my sign up for a few days, and while I liked it, I didn’t think it was quite ready. It was too plain. So I brought it back inside and grabbed a Sharpie marker, which I used to add “stitches” to the edges of all the main pieces – the rectangle, the flower, and the center of the flower. That helped a lot, but it still needed something else. So I found some faux flowers I’ve had for a while (a freebie from JoAnn’s months and months ago). I cut of the stems of those using wire cutters and superglued them to the top (I was out of hot glue by this point). Now it’s done, and I’m really happy with how it looks!

Blessings,

Disclosure: I received this product free through the Homeschool Review Crew.

Kindergarten is such a fun age! Kids are excited to learn, and the learning they do is so laid back that it’s just a great time to be a parent. To enhance Dragonfly’s kindergarten experience, we have had the pleasure of reviewing the Tracing Bundle from The Crafty Classroom. Dragonfly loves to trace stuff, so this was a great fit for him. The Tracing Bundle comes with two files: Editable Name Tracing Pack and Tracing Bundle C. I want to talk about the latter first.

Tracing Bundle

This file is a 297-page printable PDF with loads and loads of things for your child to trace. Dragonfly and I looked over it together and he picked a few pages he wanted to trace. I also chose a couple that I wanted him to work on to help him in his early penmanship. Then I printed them all out and stuck them in a folder to distribute to him slowly. Each day we worked on these (about 3x a week), I gave him one of “his” pages and one of “my” pages. His were mostly shapes and pictures; mine were mostly words and numbers.

The Tracing Bundle includes things like the uppercase and lowercase alphabet, numbers, colors, shapes, days of the week, months of the year, seasons, and sight words. Then there are images – dogs with bones, seashells and waves, and more. As you move through the pack, the emphasis changes to drawing the shapes in the right order – for your square, starting in the upper left corner, going straight down, then to the right, then up, and back to the left. This guidance is helpful for “pre-writing,” encouraging children to do things in the right order. That way, when they’re ready to write letters, they understand the concept of doing things in the right order.

Editable Name Tracing Pack

This one was really cool! The very first page of this PDF is the instructions on how to edit it properly. (The main thing is that it has to be opened in Adobe Acrobat, not a web browser or other program.) Then you scroll through until you get to this page:

As you can see, there are three choices here. Each one is attached to a theme. Pick the one you want, and type in your child’s name(s), and the PDF will pop those names into the appropriate pages for printing

This gives you the same types of tracing pages, but all entirely personalized. This is fantastic for kids from around 3-4 and up who are learning to write their names. I wish I’d had this for my older kids! You can bet I’ll be using it next year with Bumblebee, though, as well as working with Dragonfly sooner with it. What a fantastic resource for helping kids to write their name!

Final Thoughts

I am super glad we got to review the Tracing Bundle. It has been really great to have something simple for Dragonfly to work on while I’m doing more intense work with the bigger kids. He adores writing and drawing, as I mentioned before, so he’s been happy as a clam with these pages, and I’m happy to print out as many of them as he can work through.

The Crafty Classroom has offered a variety of different products to the Homeschool Review Crew members, so make sure to check out more reviews by clicking through.

Blessings,

Disclosure: I received this product free through the Homeschool Review Crew.

My oldest son has been working on writing a novel with his girlfriend, so I thought he might benefit from the Excellence in Literature Handbook for Writers from Everyday Education. The PDF e-book is over 400 pages long and has tons of valuable information for writers from middle school on up.

From Ballet Boy:

The part of the book that I used was Pointers and Tips on how to write what’s considered a “good” essay from a logical perspective. It included information on how to structure sound arguments, and thus how to fulfill the purpose of an essay. It touched on the fact that an essay is not meant to deliver facts so much as it to convey a convincing point of view, or to sell an idea.

The author discusses the weakness of starting your essay with something that is a trivial or obvious claim. For example, if your essay is about Hamlet and your opening sentence says “Hamlet was the Prince of Denmark and he dies at the end of the play,” that neither conveys new information to the reader nor takes a stand about anything. Another weak sentence starter it gives as an example is “The French Revolution, which started in 1789, brought about many changes.” This, too, is a fact that can be checked by any reputable source and therefore can’t be the topic of an essay. It’s only something that can guide you toward a sound and logical argument.

This is not to say that an essay shouldn’t have the facts in it. But the mistake people often make in writing essays is that they get hung up on the facts, myself included. Then their essay becomes the answer sheet to a trivia game instead of someone trying to convince you of a point or position. This renders the essay redundant.

Moving over to the novel I’m writing, I have started using some of these same principles to create a more engaging story, one that is less concerned about delivering facts and descriptions (talking about the time of day and how the wind blows) and is more about invoking concern, emotion, and feeling in myself and my future readers.

Recently I was writing a scene where my two main characters are interacting with each other, and one of them is injured, lying on a couch. Instead of having a description of the room that they’re talking in, I have different characters interact with their surroundings. For example, instead of describing that the couch has lots of pillows on it, I have one of my characters grab a pillow and move it slightly to better support his head. And instead of describing how the room has a soft rug (or carpet), I instead talk about how their feet sink into the soft ground whenever they take a step.

All in all, I’d say this is a very good resource that I would recommend to a beginner or someone who intends to write anything of importance, whether a thesis statement in grad school or a fantasy novel for teenagers.

Make sure to read more reviews from the Homeschool Review Crew!

Blessings,