I love arts and crafts, though for obvious reasons, I haven't done anything since the baby was born. While nesting, I bought my first hot glue gun and made some beautiful things. I'm not a professional artist and I'm not even great at it, but I try.
Sometimes I use Pinterest as my inspiration. I never try to directly copy the Pinterest-perfect craft. Instead, I use it as inspiration and make it my own.
While I was still pregnant, my mom sent me a Pinterest craft pin for the nursery. I thought it would be the perfect thing to make for my mom for Josephine's first mother's day.
Here is the original Pinterest picture from Etsy.
First I needed to remove the back from a frame I already had. This was easy enough to do with a razor knife. I then cleaned the smudged glass. I held the edges as I used Windex and paper towels to make it shine. And I cut my fingers twice. Ouch.
Originally I thought if I smothered something greasy on my baby's feet, I'd create footprints on the glass and decorate the other side. In my first attempt, my baby squirmed. I needed to clean the glass again.
Next attempt was when she was asleep. It's easiest for me to ease her into a nap while we're nursing on the couch. I waited until she had drifted off, then replaced my body with a pillow. Success! Sleeping baby feet are much easier to handle than awake baby feet.
Unfortunately, the oil was just too slippery to make a good print. And to my disgust, one of the cats jumped onto the couch and started to lick the oil off her feet. Ick! I thought for sure she'd wake, but baby sleeping powers are resilient. And back to cleaning the glass, again.
Attempt #3 was a tried and true method: an ink pad. Thankfully I had one large enough to cover her feet. Using blue ink near a white couch was not ideal, but I wasn't going to try to move her. Finally, success! I had a pair of perfect ink footprints for this Pinterest project. And as a bonus, I can add the paper to her scrapbook which I plan to start making soon.
With the glass over the paper, I traced the footprints in Swarovski crystal beads: little ones on the outside, larger ones on the inside, darker colors to represent darker ink, clear ones to represent a light touch, and large to small beads for large to small toes. It was slow, delicate, deliberate work. Hot glue is a challenge to work with to keep the glass free of dried glue strings, but I did my best.
I used puffy paint to write on the glass. My handwriting isn't great to begin with, but puffy paint on glass is awkward. My six didn't quite look like a six and my attempt to fix it only made it worse. Oh well, it's Mother's Day 201[blob]. Finally, it was done!
Second-to-last step: cleaning the glass for the last time. I pulled out my Windex and made a big mistake. Windex detaches tried hot glue from glass! A third of my beads fell off where I sprayed. The baby was awake and in my husband's arms and he was unsympathetic to my craft dilemma, urging me to hurry up. There was much cursing.
I reglued the beads, using even more this time. Finally, the last step: gluing the glass to the frame. Easy! It wasn't Pinterest-perfect, but it was better than I expected. My mom would love it: her daughter's art using her granddaughter's feet.
Speaking of, the blue ink didn't immediately wash off of my baby's feet. Oops. Two days later and the blue has faded, but it looked pretty funny for a while.
Happy Mother's Day to all the Pinterest-worthy and Pinterest-unworthy craft recipients out there!
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| My mom admiring her gift. Note her finger on the glass where there is now a smudge! |
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