kiddo kraft - MAY

MAY i help you? whew - where has this month gone?

i still haven't "recovered" from my mission trip, and i hope i never will, and my craftiness has been dowsed in sweat cause it's already stinking HOT HOT HOT and mosquito-ville down here in H-town.

we took some weekend trips to the beach (where leila turned into a lobster - ouch) and to sea world (SHAMOOOOOOOO), and now i'm planning for leila's birthday party! where did the time go - four precious, lightning-speed years?!

so, this month's kiddo craft of the month is: hand print thank-you art

(very creative description, right?)

of course you could do this a variety of ways - we did 2 in guatemala.

i bought a value pack of flat canvases from michael's (they were on sale for 50% off) - some 8x10 and some 5x7.

with the 5x7s, i traced each of our hands on the canvas with a black sharpie marker. (and i wrote our names on the back so we knew which hand was whose!)

then, we had 2 different colored inks (the type doesn't matter) and had each of the orphans place their inked thumbprint inside the traced hand. there were 40 orphans, so the hand got filled up without any problem. and, there was a one-month old baby there, so one of my teammates had the idea of printing her foot instead of her thumb - since she was so tiny ( ~6 pounds!).

on the finished project i wrote: my hands on them, their prints on me. and i wrote the orphanage and country and year. i have plans to frame it, somehow. until then, it sits propped up "smiling" at me. this would be a cool teacher gift if you could swindle Mr. or Mrs. Teacher's hand print/outline.

even though i hugged them, i hand-washed their dirty clothes, i prayed with them, I I I I I I I I I....i could say everything I did, but THEY touched my life more dramatically than any of my small tasks! i think this is a pretty good visual representation of that idea.

for the second hand print project, we used the 8x10 flat canvases. i don't know what i was thinking about the size. if there's a bigger one, i'd use it - because 40 hand prints (and some foot prints) in an 8x10 space is pretty much chaos - but pretty chaos! ;)

we used crayola finger paint because it was easy to clean off the kids, but if i could do it again, and if i had bigger canvases, i would use acrylic. BUT - it worked where we were at. and even though it looks like one big giant mess - you could distinguish their fingers (and toes) in certain places on the canvases. so even though you couldn't see all the hands, i wrote every one of the kids' names on the back of the canvas with a thank you note (from the kids) to the mama workers and the missionaries. the mamas seemed to think they were nice - and the KIDS were so excited to GIVE something to the women who help take care of them at the orphanage.