A new twist on an old craft...

Two weekends ago, I went to a scrapbooking retreat.  It was heaven, great food, good company and a weekend of scrapbooking from 8 am to midnight.  One of the conversations held early in the weekend was over the topic of "what special thing did you do for your husband for Father's Day."  The conversation centered around thoughtful gifts, such as handmade cards, a couples cooking class, etcetera, etcetera.  Doh!  I hadn't done anything too extravagant...we are practical gifters, giving each other things that we need or have expressed an interest in.  L needs an external thermostat for his beer fermenting freezer, a thermostat he will get!

But, it occurred to me that extravagant and meaningful are two different things, and I knew that this would give me an opportunity to get the girls involved in some crafting, which is hard to do with a 2 year old in the mix.  So, remembering back to my grade school days, I opted to do some thumbprint art.  I had each girl make thumbprints on a piece of paper.  K decided to do hers next to one another so that we could later turn them into butterflies.  A was just happy to be involved, no rhyme or reason to her printing.  I had also cut out a giant heart using my Cricut, and went ahead and threw two of my thumbprints into the mix, making a (somewhat) concentric heart inside of it.

After the girls went to their respective quiet times, I got out my scrapbooking stuff and went to work.  I drew butterflies around K's prints and dragonflies out of A's prints (which are appropriate since K has butterflies hanging from the ceiling of her room, and A has a dragonfly mobile).  Then I put some double sided sticky foam on the backs of each bug, and begin sticking them to a 12x12 piece of cardstock.  A few "manly" flowers (or at least I hope he considers them manly) were cut out of some paper I had, and a few other embellishments were added and we were done.  Instant meaningful father's day gift that we all had a hand in.  I'll likely head to Michaels this weekend and get a frame for it, hopefully he can put it up at work.  Now I don't feel so practical :).

Here it is, I had to use a photostitcher to put the image together since my scanner doesn't do 12 x 12, so it looks a little off-kilter, but you get the gist.