Painted Pottery: A Hand Print Keepsake for Thanksgiving

Last year, I found such a cute idea on Pinterest. I copied it exactly because it was too cute a perfect! I made this Halloween plate using Jo's footprints. Well, I got the idea to do something similar using the kids' hand prints. I meant to make a plate last year for Thanksgiving but lost track of time. I finally got around to making it now. So, here it is, my new, Thanksgiving turkey hand print plate! The print on the left is Oliver's, and the print on the right is Jo's. Those paint-your-own-pottery places are so fun.

100 (Attempted) Ways to Entertain a Young Toddler, Day 94: Water Hand Prints and Footprints

Oliver helped me come up with today's toddler activity for Jo. We've been getting some afternoon thunderstorms recently (yay, rain!). A few days ago, he tracked wet footprints all over the back patio. We ended up having a lot of fun making hand prints and footprints on the cement. He loved it when my in-laws' dogs tracked paw prints to look at, too!

I decided to recreate that fun with Jo. I got a bucket of water, but I bet this would work even better with a baking pan full of water. I showed Jo how to make hand prints with the water.

Jo had a lot of fun in the water! She wasn't able to quite "get it" yet, though. She would put hand prints on places that were already wet. She had fun and mimicked what Oliver and I were doing, but I don't think she was fully grasping that the point was to leave prints behind. I mean, that's totally OK. She had fun! I just wanted to point out that she was still a little too young to fully understand the cause-and-effect of using water to make hand prints. So, this activity was fun but might be best for kids who are a little older.

I give this activity a B grade. It was so easy to do! It's nice playing with water when it's hot outside, and the kids had fun. Jo didn't really understand the point of the whole thing, though, so I might as well have just plopped her into a toddler pool with a bucket. Actually, that probably would have even been more fun...

Pinterest Find! Halloween Footprint Dish

I found the cutest painted plate on Pinterest. Here's the pin, if you're interested in repinning:
http://pinterest.com/pin/216383957067061530/

Last month, one of those deal sites offered a half-off voucher for a local paint-your-own-pottery place. I printed out a copy of the plate and went there with some friends. The woman there helped me stamp Jo's feet onto the plate, and then I painted the rest of the plate just like in the pinned photo. I wasn't sure how well it would turn out, but it was fantastic!

Here's my plate before firing:

And here's the finished product:

I love it! I swear, Pinterest is the best resource for craft ideas. I'm going to try to get back to the pottery place sometime soon to paint a Thanksgiving plate with my son's hand print. I'll paint it into a turkey!

100 (Attempted) Ways to Entertain a Young Toddler, Day 41: Handprint Mold

This past February, we made handprint molds of Oliver's hands. We sent one to Aunt Julie for a Valentine's Day gift.

While struggling to come up with an activity today, I decided to try handprint molds again. Last time, he was too little to do much with the molds. I wondered if it would be more fun for him this time. Here's what we made back in February:

There were a few recipes I found online. Here's the one I ended up using this time:

2 cups flour
3/4 cup salt
1 cup water, plus more as needed
food coloring (optional)

1. Mix the flour and salt together. Set aside.

2. Dissolve food coloring in water (I used 5 drops of green and got a very light, pale green).

3. Mix colored water into the flour mixture. Add more water as needed to achieve a dough consistency.

Once we had our dough, I let Oliver play with half as I smoothed the other half out by rolling it into a ball on the table. I rolled it out and helped Oliver smash his hand into it. Our first try wasn't a success because I didn't smash his hand firmly enough. We ended up doing three attempts. By the end, Oliver knew the routine, and he enjoyed rolling out his half of the dough and mashing his hands into it, creating a mosaic of handprints.


I used an upside-down bowl to cut out a circle shape on the one I wanted to keep. Then, I used a chopstick to create a hole on top for a ribbon later. Using a dead pen, I wrote Oliver's name and the year. The recipe says you can just let the print dry for 24 hours. I put ours in a 200 degree (Fahrenheit) oven for 30 minutes to get it set. I'll let it continue to set for 24 hours so I don't mess it up.

This ended up being a lot of fun for Oliver. I don't know if he realized we were actually making something, but he enjoyed the process of mixing and rolling it out. He definitely had a good time. I liked creating a keepsake, and I plan on mailing the finished product to Andrew's grandma (Oliver's great-grandmother). All in all, it was a lot of fun for both of us. I give this activity an A!