Handmade Spiderman Birthday Invitations

My 5 year old will be turning 6 at the end of this month so I am busily trying to keep up on the planning of his Spiderman party so that I am not going crazy with last minute prep {who am I kidding...that will still happen}. Most years I have made an effort to hand make the kids' birthday invitations. Doesn't always happen but it is something I enjoy doing and because we keep the guest list family-only still, it isn't very time intensive. This year's Spiderman theme was pretty easy to turn into an invitation. Want to see the finished product?

Okay...not totally finished because I have to add the party info to the back but you get the gist. Let me walk you through this super easy Spiderman face. I did this free hand and if you know me you know that drawing is not one of my strong suits...my point being that if I can do this, so can you!

First Step: Trace and cut out a Spiderman shaped face. Like I said before, I did this free hand while looking at a picture online but you could cheat do it the smart way and print off a picture to trace for more exact measurements.

Second Step: Add a spiderweb to the face. I did this with a black sharpie but you could easily use a puff pen for dimension or even glue and glitter for a sparkly touch.

Third Step: Create eye mask. This was done in three parts:

1) Cut out black part of mask - here is where it would pay to print off something, as you can see my free hand skills at this step were pretty poor

2) Use an X-acto knife to remove the part of the mask where the white will show through

3) Glue a white strip of paper onto the back of the black mask

Fourth (and final) Step: Glue the mask to Spiderman's face. Easy as that!

Some other suggestions for this -
**This would make a great lunch box note for your little guy (or gal!) who loves Spiderman. Just write your note on the back and slip it into your kiddo's lunch box on a special day.
**Make this large sized out of poster board and play "Pin the mask on Spiderman" at your party.
**Use these as accents on your party banner.
Lots of possibilities!

I will be sharing more of my party prep as I go but in the meantime you can follow my Spiderman Party board on Pinterest to see where I am getting my inspiration.

Countdown to Thanksgiving

I love crafts. Always have. When I pictured myself as a mom I pictured lots of hands on crafts with my kids. So when my oldest boys were big enough to sit at the table I started planning all of these fun projects to do. I quickly realized just how hard it is to complete a project with two toddlers! Needless to say, it started to be fewer and further between that I let my boys in on my crafts because it just felt more like work then fun. But now that they are 4 and 5 I really want to make more of an effort to get hands on with them. And thanks to Pinterest, I have a LOT of ideas to choose from!

The holiday season is a great time for crafts. There is so much inspiration to draw from. We decided to start with a Countdown To Thanksgiving craft (thanks to Make and Takes for the inspiration) that will help us get excited for the big feast as well as remember what we are thankful for each day. This was a great project to do with my kids because it only involved a handful of supplies and they were able to help with each step.

I started by cutting out the body, the head, the facial features and the strips for the feathers. Jordan got to draw on the eyes and glue on the beak, waddle, and legs.

Nathan got to write Happy Thanksgiving on the body.

They both got to trim the strips of paper into feathers.

 Now I have seen this project where you start with all of the feathers and then take one off for each day as a countdown to Thanksgiving. I liked the idea of adding a feather a day so that you end with a full bird so we are going to do it that way. Each day I am going to ask each of my boys what they are thankful for and write it on the feather before adding it to the body. At the end we will have a nice keepsake to look back on:)

Since we didn't start this until November 5th, we had 5 feathers to catch up on. It was sweet listening to my 4 year old say first that he was thankful that God and Jesus loved him and my 5 year old list his brothers as what he is most thankful for. I look forward to the next 19 days not only because that means Thanksgiving is here and we get to celebrate with loved ones, but also to hear each day what my little guys are thankful for in their life.