Mother's Day gifts, 2013

I found this idea while looking through the ads one Sunday morning. Old Time Pottery had these advertised for $8.99. Not a bad price but I knew that I could make one and decided that it would be a great Mother's Day gift for the grandmas (and of course I had to have one too!) This project took a while to do, not because it was hard but because the wood soaked up the paint so quickly, I had to paint things 3 times to make them look right! I bough the wooden plaques at JoAnns, with Qpons. Painted each one in colors that coordinate with decor in our homes (mine will hang in my "Irish" kitchen, hence the bright green). I used a Sharpie paint pen to write on the wood, once all of the paint was dry. I'd thought about cutting out letters with my Cricut and doing a Mod Podge thing but decided against that - way more work than I wanted to do! We used Crayola Washable paint for Ryann to put her hand and fingerprints all over. Once dry, we used a spray varnish to set it all. (I always use varnish on wooden projects but with the washable paint on this one, I wasn't sure if I could use liquid varnish and didn't want to mess it up!). Then, with super bond glue, I added the metal clips (these are magnetic, found in the stationary section at Wal-Mart). The ones that I saw in the ad had 3 clips on them but I thought that made the plaque too crowded - gotta have room to hang up Ryann's handy work (pun intended) =)