Echo Park Handprint/Footprint Ornaments

Echo Park Paper gave its in-house team and Fresh Face designers a challenge to make holiday projects with children. My child is 2 so that did present a challenge.... I went old-school and made ornaments using my son’s handprints and footprints.

This is an easy and fun project to do, but a bit messy, as it does involve a toddler with paint on his hands and feet. Right before bath time is a good time. Just sayin’.

We started with handprints. I enlisted my mom’s help and we painted Cory’s hand with red acrylic paint then stamped his hand on cardstock. We tried both white cardstock and kraft to see which we liked better.

After the handprints dried, I cut them out to form Santa’s face and beard, adding googly eyes, a button nose and a brad smile. I hand-drew a hat from Echo Park paper then used a small circle punch and some adhesive pearls for the trim. We finished the ornament with a “ho ho ho” sticker and a twine hanger.

To make the penguin, I painted Cory’s foot with black acrylic paint and stamped his foot on white cardstock. After the black paint dried, Cory used his fingers and some white acrylic paint to give the penguin a belly. We added arms (flippers) and a hat using Echo Park paper (Metro Dots and Stripes), stickers and brads. We finished the penguin with a chipboard greeting and a twine scarf.

You can find more about this project and other Echo Park projects with kids on the EP blog.  　

Supplies:

CS: Bazzill Basics

PP: Echo Park Paper (Holly Jolly, Metro Dots and Stripes)

Brads: Echo Park Paper and American Crafts

Button: Making Memories

Adhesive Pearls: Close To My Heart

Paint: Plaid

Punch: Marvy Uchida

Twine: The Twinery

Scraptastic Club Guest Designer

It’s December and I am so happy to welcome in the holiday season. Today, I officially start my December Daily and my little one opens the first door of his Lego Advent calendar.

But first I want to share that I am a guest designer this month for Scraptastic Club. It’s a great kit club that gives you a choice of two kits each month. Both kits have great add-on options too. You can find the kits here. 

I chose the Naughty or Nice? kit.

Here’s my first project. I scrapped a photo of my Dad with my brothers on Christmas morning. I love this Crate ornament paper. I pop-dotted some of the ornaments for dimension then set off the paper by adding borders punched from cream cardstock down either side.

The large green die cut is Bo Bunny and it had a blue scallop design around the perimeter, which made the die cut too big for my design.  So, I cut off the blue and stitched a red frame to ground the die cut. On top, I added a tag using a cute reindeer stamp from Imaginesce and alphas from Lily Bee.

Scraptastic Club sponsors challenges each month with great prizes. Come play along. The first challenge is to use border punches and you have until Dec. 31 to upload your entry. The prize this month is the Random Collection from Crate Paper. Oh, I love that line!   You can find the challenges on the Scraptastic Club Blog here.

Altered Frame for Halloween

I love altering ordinary picture frames around the house, especially for the holidays. I looked around our den and spied a nice black frame in the den that holds an 8x10 family photo.  I removed the photo and ended with this.

This project was really easy to make. I started with a piece of white cardstock, cutting it down to 8x10 inches. I grabbed some of my favorite Halloween paper, Echo Park's Apothecary, adding in an orange pattern from EP’s previous Halloween release for a punch of color.  I used a square punch to make 20 squares, then moved them around in a grid with five rows across and four down, leaving a little white border between them. I also left a white border around the page so I would have some wiggle room for the image in the frame.  

I tacked the squares down lightly with adhesive, then used a sewing machine to make diagonal lines across the squares with black thread.

Here you can see the squares before I embellished them. And, yes, the project is shown upside down.  Hee! I didn’t realize that until I uploaded the photos.  I tried flipping the photo, but it looked weird. So, we’ll just go with this. J

To embellish the squares, I used element stickers from Apothecary and Happy Halloween. I backed the stickers with cardboard to give them a little dimension. You can also use pop dots but for large stickers, like the tree, I prefer to use cardboard as it gives a smoother look.

So, there you have it. A really quick, fun project that you can make for any holiday. This was my last project as guest designer for Echo Park. I uploaded this project to 2peas and was happy to look the next day to see that of 425 projects, it had made the daily top 3 most bookmarked.