Anniversary Gift

Four days before Kalia's arrival, and 2 days before my scheduled induction, Chris and I celebrated our 5 year wedding anniversary.  We don't really do typical gifts for our anniversaries...we plan a trip instead and call it our anniversary gift.  Well, this year our anniversary gift was Kalia.  And she was promptly late!

I wanted to give Chris something that told him all of the things I loved about him, so I got a deck of cards :

Took construction paper and typed up various things I loved about Chris, and decoupaged it to one side of the card (yes, for all 52 cards!) :

And then took the pictures that Erin had taken of Chris and I back in November, used glossy print paper and printed out the images to size of the cards, and then decoupaged those to the front of the card.

I put the cards in a tin box.  I actually meant to decoupage the tin box too, but ran out of time / energy prior to heading to the hospital.  Chris really appreciated the gift, and had a lot of fun reading through all of my serious and funny ways that I love him.  He also loved that it incorporated pictures of us that he can go back and look at anytime.

For dinner that night, we headed to Melting Pot.  The hostess / waitress / manager all couldn't believe I was out and about at 40 weeks and 4 days pregnant, but I told them I was trying to test my luck to go into labor on my own.  It didn't work out too well, but not for lack of trying!  Here's a few pictures of us from dinner that night.  Man oh man, I was so pregnant in these photos!!

Hopefully I'll get around to posting the final nursery sometime soon!  Sorry I haven't been responding to emails / comments just yet, but supposedly this sleep thing gets better :-), so I should be back at projecting with a cute helper, and responding to comments / emails soon!!

Hope everyone has a great week.  Happy Monday!

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Home-made Christmas gift

With everything that's been going on the latter part of this year, I only had time to make one Christmas gift. I'm hoping to do a home-made Christmas next year, or at least a lot more home-made gifts, so hopefully with Chris's school now being done, I'll be able to focus more on that while still doing all of my other million projects I've got planned for 2011. Pretty soon, I'm going to have to start filling out my 2012 project list. The 2011 one is already getting quite long.

Onto the gift...

I always ask my sisters for ideas on what my nieces need or would like for Christmas. One of my nieces was adopted last year from China. She is such a special little girl, and we're so lucky to have her as an addition to our family. My sister's suggestion for her this year was "maybe you could do Chinese symbols that mean special things for Ashlyn or she really likes pretty princess stuff for her walls". So, I racked my brain and came up with my own DIY idea to incorporate both.

First up, I got this pad of scrapbook paper from Jo-Ann's. I only needed 6 sheets for my project, but I couldn't find 6 sheets that were princess related, so I just bought the whole pad. Besides, it gave me room to error (which I most definitely did...a few times!).

Next up, I got a 4x8 piece of wood from home depot and had them cut it into 12" squares.

Then, I found a website that translates English words into Chinese lettering, here, and came up with 6 different words that I wanted to put on my scrap paper.  I copied them onto a word document and blew them up, and then printed them out.

I traced over the Chinese lettering with a pencil, pushing really hard (like so hard my arms were shaking) so that I left the outlines of the Chinese lettering on my scrapbook paper.  Then I traced over that with a black sharpie, painted inside of my tracings, painted the side of my 12x12 board, decoupaged my paper to my board, and WALA :

Oh yeah, and I wrote the English version of what I had written in Chinese in the bottom right hand corner.  Yeah, I know, I skipped taking pictures step-by-step, but I'm on a time crunch here lately!

Here's a view from the side :

Of course, she needs to be able to hang these on her wall, so I picked up a pack of mounting hardware that you just push into the back of the picture to secure.  My husband came up with this solution after my fat fingers couldn't hold the silly little nails that come with normal hanging hardware, and the board is too thin to use mounting hardware with screws.  He's a genius, I swear!

And then I repeated this 5 more times, each with different sayings.  The next two were words that come to my mind when I think of Ashlyn.  If they would've had the word goofball or silly, I would've written that down, but since they didn't, I decided to go the more sentimental (yet still true) route.

For the next three, I love the live, laugh, love saying...and I think it especially holds true to how Ashlyn, even at only 7 years old, lives her life.  She's such a carefree and fun little person to be around!!

The laugh one is actually my least favorite with the way it turned out.  It was late one night when I was trying to finish this up, so I got a bit of bubbling, and one of the fans blew some stuff on top of it while it was still drying.  I'll probably try to do another one for her at some point, assuming she likes these, but this will just have to do for now!

And here's a shot of all 6 of them together :

I have no idea why I thought this would be a quick and easy project, but overall I'm pretty happy with how it all came out.  And I'm happy with the fact that I could give my niece a gift that I spent time thinking about and making...a gift from the heart.

What do you think?  Are you making any homemade gifts this year?

Hope everyone has a fantastic weekend!!  Happy almost Friday!!!

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I'm linking up to the parties on my sidebar...go check out what everyone else is making!