Just another display of the photo block ornaments I made. You couls easily take off the hooks and strings and just make them into a dislay! Too cute!

JOY Blocks

For our teacher gifts this year I decided to have the kids make JOY blocks! These are VERY similar to the block ornaments and the "THANKS" blocks I made for Thanksgiving! I got the blocks from my friend Kristy, who is the creative activities gal at the other MOPS in town.

Here are the kiddos mod podging the scrapbook paper to the blocks! I was so amazed at how well Elijah did his blocks!! He has two teachers so I ended up finishing his blocks for him. But he was so good about centering the paper and placing it nicely on the blocks.

The finished product!!! They turned out really cute! And the teachers LOVED them!!! We had the kids sign the bottom of one of the blocks with their name and year...making them even more special for the teachers. All of their teachers commented on how unique and special they were...and they were already on display in their homes before the end of the week!

The kids were so proud of them!

Cookie Kit

Earlier this month a good friend of mine handed me this super cute gift at MOPS! It is a "Christmas Cookie Kit"!!!! What a cute idea!

Alia is looking down upon all the yumminess!!!
This is what the Kit looked like! It came with two small jars of sprinkles, a jar of white frosting that was wrapped in cute holiday scrapbook paper, and six sugar cookies! The sugar cookies were cute like ornaments so they were tied so delicately with bakers string! We found out later that the cookies came from our local grocery store! Perfect!

My big kids LOVED decorating and eating their cookies! Thanks a ton, Sheri!!!

A Mickey Christmas!

As part of my brother's families Christmas presents I sewed them all Mickey head shirts! They will be spending Christmas at Walt Disney World in Florida so I thought it would be a perfect gift for them! We will miss them a ton this Christmas! But I know they'll have a blast :)

This shirt is my brother's. I decided not to make a big Mickey head for him...it just didn't feel..."guy". :) So I put a small Mickey head in the middle of the front of his shirt.

This is Mary's shirt-she's my sister-in-law. I think this one's my favorite out of all of them!

And I made two of these for my niece's!!!
I've made them Mickey head shirts before...but I really love how these turned out. I used a textured fabric for the black heads and the texture adds so much pizazz to the shirt!

Christmas ornaments!

Today was the December MOPS craft day!! And this is what we made!!!

Personalized Christmas ornaments! I saw these on a blog I follow, howdoesshe, and fell in love with them!



The table in the back of the MOPS room. I displayed all of the sample ornaments on two little trees I have. I was able to find some battery operated lights to put on them, too!

Thanks to the MOPS steering team for helping me cut all the millions of squares of paper for the blocks!!! Each block has 5 sides with mod podged holiday scrapbook paper on them. Then, the sixth side has a picture mod podged onto it.

And here are all of the millions of blocks my AMAZING hubby cut and sanded!!! He is truly AMAZING!!! And thanks to Justin Reed and Jackie Bounds for helping sand, too!

These tins are full of ribbon to use to hang the ornaments!

Fun friends!!!!

More crafters!!

Here's what everything looked like on their plates!

MOPS moms gathering their materials.

Operation Christmas Child

The past few years we've been making shoeboxes for Operation Christmas Child. This year the kids really got what they were doing and had so much fun! It was so great to see the kids so excited to bless and give to other kids!!!

Here we are at Target...we first has to get boxes bacause we didn't have any!

Then, we filled the boxes with all kinds of fun toys!

We got home and organized everything into the boxes so we could actually but the lid on the boxes!

Here they are on the morning we brought them to church!

Time to take them to the back table at church!

Thanksgiving

We had a busy thanksgiving break this year!! But we had so much fun being with family and friends. God has blessed us so much by putting amazing people into our lives!

I was able to help in Alia's class for her thanksgiving celebration. They did some crafts and had a mini feast.



The day before Thanksgiving we bundled everyone up and headed to Disneyland with some good friends!! It was a bit more crowded that we were expecting but we had a lot of fun regardless! 4 parents and 7 kids...can't beat that! =)

Great Grandma Malnu joined us for Thanksgiving! After we got home from our dinner Ethan sat down and looked at a book with Great Grandma! So precious!!

We went to some family friend's house (Dick and Bonnie) for Thanksgiving dinner. They were super brave to host us all! :) Of course, the kids had a kids table.

My friend Jaime made these turkey coloring books...and I stole the idea! I think they are so cute and the kids had fun coloring in them!

Enjoy the pictures of our family!

COUSINS!

BACKLUNDS!

Ethan and grammpa Jim!

Me and my daddy! i love you dad!

Great Grandma and the great grandkids.
(my camera is broken...it won't zoom...sorry it's so far away)

Some projects

I thought I'd share a few more projects...

Since I already made my Christmas countdown (the sample for the ladies to see) I decided to do something else with the blocks I had left. So I took some scrapbook paper with fall colors and mod podged them to the blocks. Then this weekend I cut the work THANKS out of cardstock on my cricut and mod podged them onto the blocks. I only had 6 blocks so all I could write was THANKS :) Then I added a few buttons to a few of the blocks. And up it went by my fall pumpkins!

I saw this idea at HOWDOESSHE and thought it is so cute. It's called a "friend board". All the words on it are words I would use to describe my friend and/or our friendship. The parenthesis and words were all cut on my cricut with vinyl...and then placed accordingly.

...and then on the back I decided to type out an explanation of each word.

While this project took a bit longer than I had anticipated (I learned a lot about Mod Podge!!) I was super excited about how it turned out!!! My friends mean the world to me and, for me, this is a fun, creative, and special way to honor them on their birthdays! It'd also be a great gift for mother's day or any other special day!!!