Project Home, part 1

Aaron and I have lived in 7 places in the last 9 years, moving our growing family with us. I've  always felt that each place was really just a placeholder, but never a home. Each time we moved was a little mini-adventure (and a lot of heavy lifting for Aaron...) and it was nice to have the freedom to move when and where we wanted. Now that we've completed our family, the wonder of new places has worn off, and I find myself wanting to make a sense of home for the kids.

This weekend, I set to work on a few little art projects: framing the paintings my mother gave us for our wedding (nearly 9 years ago now) and painting some art for the kids' room. Both on a very small budget.

For the painting, I purchased two 12" frames from Michaels:

and used 2 pieces of scrapbook paper in "Cinder" as matting:

These paintings are going up in our room, above our dressers.


For the kids' room, I bought 4 12" canvases and scrounged paint I bought for another project in their room that I will share as soon as I finish it :)

I found a font I liked, and enlarged each of their initials on my computer screen, then traced them in marker. I cut out the tracing, and taped it to the back of each canvas. Then I held the canvas up to a reading light and painted the letters in.

For the fourth canvas, I got foot- and hand-prints from each of them...Aaron had to help with George and I had to paint over his a bit to get the right idea...but that still counts, right?

I wrote their exact age next to their prints and hung them about the dresser on their wall:

Here is a close up of their prints:

I'll add more projects as I finish them, hopefully this year :)

I also have a pretty big backlog of baking experiments to share, so brace yourselves for way too many cakes!

I survived!

I made it out the other end of perhaps the craziest thing I have done in my life: grad school prep, working full time and carrying my son at the same time. One set of finals at 39 weeks pregnant and another set with a 9 week old baby. This week, I'm done!
I made a happy, healthy baby. I got higher grades than I needed (just barely, but I'm counting it as a victory!). I got promoted at work.
All this means I have the summer to finish all the projects I have on hold, and bake all the confections I've been drooling over. And I have time to go through the photos I've taken this year and finally turn them into posts :) I hope you all enjoy crafting and cake, because there's about to be a whole lot of both.
And possibly nerdy commentary on the world....but mostly cake.