(Don't tell my mom, but this is what we made her for Mother's Day. Shhhhh.)

So I'm banking on the fact that no one in my family reads my blog....

If you are my mother, father, uncle, or sister's cousins baby's uncle, stop reading right now. Don't ruin the surprise. Okay, I warned you. Moving on...


Not all grandparents like to walk around in "cute", homemade t-shirts from their grandkids.  Luckily mine do!  So here are this season's latest creations.

The shirts and oven mitts all came from the dollar store, and most of the other supplies we used came from home. I did buy some fancy puff paint pens for $5. So on average each of these shirts cost me less than three $3 each.

A word of advice for all of these projects: Put cardboard in between the layers so the paint doesn't bleed through. Use a blow dryer after each paint color to help it dry quickly so you can move on to the next color of paint.

"Best Grandma, Hands Down"

We started with stickers to write out our message.

We turned the shirt up-side-down, so that when the kids put their hands on the shirt they would be facing down.

I dipped their hands in paint, and pressed them over the letters multiple times.

We used a blow dryer to speed up time between each color.

Then we pressed more hands.

After we pulled the stickers off, we could see a few places where the wording wasn't clear, so we painted in a few spot by hand with a paint brush (is using a brush really "by hand" when you're comparing it to actually painting with your hand? Hmmm....).

My five year old picked out all the colors, and I am totally stoked with how it turned out. You can't tell in this picture, but the white hands are actually a light turquoise, and they look really cool.  Awesome!

"I Love Grandma. Grandma Loves Me. We Both Love Food."
So.... my five year old was a big helper on this one. We spent nearly an hour just trying to decide what to put on the shirt. He was full of great sentiments like, "Not the worst grandma" or "Best grandma in the whole house!"   and finally, "This grandma is not too boring."

I had these fancy heart stencils that I thought would look cool.

I always start with the color closest to the color of the shirt. So if the shirt is light, I start with the lightest color paint. If it's dark, I start dark. It makes for better contrast (and readability) in the end.

We painted in a few spots where the hand prints weren't quite solid enough to make the letters.

At this point I'm getting tired of hands. I wish I owned some sponges so we could do some other shape. Any other shape! My kids also got tired of making hand prints. So most of these hands are actually mine (good think I've got kid-sized hands!).

The heart stencils were pretty much a total fail. So I used my puff paint pens to draw in the hearts.

Not the best shirt ever, but still awesome.

"My Little Helpers"

Oven mitts from the dollar store.

First set of hand-prints.

I thought it would be brilliant to reuse the same plate for painting so as to not waste too many paper plates.

I was wrong about reusing the plate. The third hand looked too much like the second hand to really show up, so I had no choice but to turn it black for the last hand print to make it show up.  Black isn't exactly pretty.

This is one of those ideas that in theory I think is adorable. In reality it is a teeny bit creepy. Who's hands are those? Are they bleeding? Did they die? Are they burnt?  Apparently color selection is more important than saving paper plates.

Good Luck!

Marcia





P.S. Nobody tell. I'd hate to ruin the surprise!