4th of July Decorations

Horray, summer is finally here. Here in Colorado we had snow in May! So I am so excited that the weather is finally warming up. Here's my darling daughter eating some watermelon. It just doesn't get much better then that. 

On Memorial Weekend I got out my 4th of July decorations so we could enjoy them early.  The 4th of July is my second favorite holiday. I love it! I love the summer. I love the patriotic spirit. I love spending the whole day celebrating and BBQing with my family. It is the best.  You can see my 4th of July Pinterest Board here. 

So these are a bunch of decorations I made last year. I love this flag inspired wreath. I searched Pinterest for the best 4th of July wreath and I just love this one! I followed this tutorial here. You basically but squares of felt and use pins to stick them into a styrofoam wreath. 

I did make a few changes. The first thing I did was wrap my styrofoam wreath with duck tape. I had a styrofoam wreath on my door before and the wind blew it off and it smashed to pieces. I am hoping the duck tape helps this one last longer. I also feel like it hugs the pins so they stay in better too. I wanted my stripes to be even, so I measured it out and marked lines on my wreath with a sharpie. I wanted to have a lot of stripes and each section is roughly 2 1/2 to 3 inches across. 

The last change I made was I painted wood stars and tied them on with wire. 

Since my wreath hangs outside, I knew paper starts would never make it. 

We also planted red, white and blue petunias! I love it. 

Now I am totally in love with Mason jars. When I saw these flag mason jars here. I knew I had to make some!! I used spray paint because I made a bunch of them and gave some away as gifts. I took an old sponge and cute my own star stamp. It worked great. 

After painting take some sand paper to the jars to roughen them up. I like the rustic look. 

I also had some small mason jars and thought, why not paint a 4th of July flag right on it? I think these darling little jars are super cute. I spray painted the jar white and then used acrylic paint to add the stripes and blue. Then I got my tinniest paint brush and hand painted on the stars. 

Let me reassure you, my stripes are not straight AT ALL!! I sanded these jars a little extra so it was really distressed and then the stripes didn't bother me. It has a great rustic look. 

I filled the cup with rice and stuck in these baby pin wheels from Micheals. 

Next I knew I had to make some great 4th of July Pinwheels. You can follow any tutorial. Here is one here.  I had some fun double sided paper which made these easy and super cute. You can find some 4th of July paper here. However, not all my paper was double sided so I simply Mod Podged some paper together. I then add some great ribbon around the stick for an extra touch. 

On my mantel. 

I am so excited for even more 4th of July projects this year. Stay tuned! And enjoy your summer!!

SMASH Journal Cover

Mother's Day

First of all let me start by saying Happy Mother's Day to all you wonderful women out there. I hope that you had a good day and know how tremendously important you are. You're role in nurturing and guiding your children is immeasurable. It is vitally important. Being a mother is beautiful, challenging, amazing, work. Give it your top priority. God will help you in this amazing work. 

For my mom for Mother's Day I made her this Grandma book. I used the Flea Market Collection from Maggie Holmes. It is one of my very favorite collections and I was surprised at how well it worked for boy and girl pages.  I love these cut apart pages. The first thing I did was cut apart all the tags and words and put them right at arms reach. I was amazed at how many embellishments you got from this one page!!! (the the bowl are several pages all cut apart). 

I used the 12 x 12 paper pad for the Flea Market Collection and the 6 x 6 pad. The album was a plain chipboard album that I covered with paper. It had a few page protectors inside and then I simple added additional pages that were not in a page protector. 

I wanted this book to just be a collect of fun memories of my children with Grammy. 

I love you mom!

I also had to include these cute pictures below. For Mother's Day my girls and I did some scrapbooking together. I worked on Project Life and they worked in their scrapbooks. It's so fun sharing something I love with them! 

I am so grateful for the gift of being a mom!

Frozen Birthday Party

Have you been walking around singing the songs to Disney's Frozen in your head? That totally describes us, except it's everyday and not in our heads, but loud and off key. We were pretty much counting down the days until Frozen came out on video and have watched it almost everyday since. When it came time to plan sweet Mckenzie's birthday party, there was no doubt it was to be the best Frozen party ever!!!

My two girls helped with a lot of the planning. One very important detail was to have Olaf outside to greet people. 

Then we turned the house into a winter wonderland. The best decoration of all were the paper snow flakes. They were cheap and easy and made such a big impact. We probably made a hundred of them and taped them up everywhere. 

I bought some digital files on Etsy and printed out a banner and some signs. It was great to have the characters from the movie as a part of the party. 

We did a party Saturday morning complete with PJs and pancakes! All the kids had pancakes dusted with snow (powdered sugar) and decked out with sprinkles! Mckenzie even had candles in her pancake tower. 

 After pancakes and presents the kids colored Frozen coloring pages and made snowmen out of marshmallows!

Our party favor were these wonderful snowflake cookies we made and decorated ahead of time! 

It was a great day.