Salt Dough Ornaments

Salt Dough Ornaments

These ornaments are the PERFECT gift!  They are great for Christmas, but can also be wonderful for Mother's Day, Easter, Birthdays, or for any holiday!  They are especially great for grandparent and other family gifts - or for anyone who loves your little one as much as you do!

Here's what you need to get started:

4 cups of flour

1 cup of salt

Water (I used about a 1 1/2 cups - amount varies)

Oil - for lightly greasing your cookie sheet

Food coloring (optional)

A Large Mixing Bowl

Cookie Sheet

Small rolling pin

Skewer or straw

Ribbon

Paint (optional)

This makes about 5 toddler sized ornaments

First, gather your ingredients.  I find when working with toddlers - it helps to be prepared ahead of time!

Next, mix the flour and salt together in a large mixing bowl.  Add a few drops of food coloring to your water.  I used 2 cups of water and 6 drops of pink food coloring.  Gradually mix the water into your dough by hand (don't forget to take off your rings - I always forget!) until your dough is moist, but not runny.  

Then, lightly oil your cookie sheet.  I put a little oil on a paper towel and rubbed the cookie sheet.

Roll your dough into small balls.  This helps get smooth edges on your ornaments.  Then gently press the balls flat with your hand.

Then roll each one smooth with the rolling pin.  This step may or may not be necessary depending on how smooth you got your dough in the first place.  My little one LOVES the rolling pin, so we went with it!

After we had our flat, round circles I gently pressed her hand into each one.  Make sure to press each finger down so you get the full imprint.  Don't push all the way through!

Then I took a skewer and made to little holes in each one.  I'll thread a ribbon through there later.  I made four handprints and one paw print of our dog... LOL.

Then set your oven on the lowest setting (ours is 170) and bake for about an hour.  You can also let them air dry for 24 hours.  Once the are dry and cool you can paint them or leave them alone.  We decided not to paint ;)  Then just thread your ribbon through!

I had to use the skewer to poke the ribbon all the way through.  Then I double knotted the ribbon and tied a bow.

ADORABLE!

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays!

Essential Etsy: SUPER STOCKING STUFFER GIVEAWAY!!!

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Enter to for a chance to win one of my hair bows!

Black Friday Crafts

OK - so normally I am up super early and out shopping and hunting for deals.  Even with Gooba as a little bag I bundled her up in the stroller and the shopping continued.  Well... this year, she's just too "toddlery" in the store for me to handle... LOL.  SO instead, we did our next favorite thing - CRAFTS!  We realized at Thanksgiving when the grandmas were looking at her alphabet scrapbook, that it was - neglected a tiny bit.  So today we caught up a little!



OK - so this is a combination of old and new.  A long time ago we made the handprint jellyfish and glued on the googly eyes.  Today, we painted the jelly jar.  This page needs a little more - but it's a good start!

Another combination page.  The watercolor J is a magic letter.  I drew a J on white paper with white crayon (not as easy as it sounds!) and she painted over.  Then I had her color June from The Little Einsteins - one of her favorite shows.  Again - could use a little more but a great start!

One to K!  Another magic letter from a while ago and today we painted the king.  I plan to add a picture of Gooba on this page since her name starts with a K too!  I just need to print one out.

One of my FAVORITES that we made today!  I cut out a diamond shape out of construction paper and Gooba tore tissue paper into tiny pieces.  Then she used a glue stick to glue on the tissue paper - which turned out somewhat modge-podgey looking.  Super fun.

Another old and new.  A long time ago we made ladybug footprints and today we made the other ladybug.  I cut out the pieces and Gooba glued them together!  Then we counted the dots on each side - see a little math on craft day too!

Then I added the hand and foot lobster we made when we made the footprint ladybugs.  We added some leaf, lion, lemon, and lime stickers too!  Then We stuck a bunch of leaves from the yard onto contact paper and stuck them on her window... also super fun!







Well I know it's not as detailed as I have been in the past, but I'm definitely catching up.  Today I've been promoting our Essential Etsy Blog and all of our Black Friday deals as well as crafting!  Lots to do - lots to do!   Don't forget to come check out my etsy shop Gooba Gear if you have a chance!  GOOBA20 earns you 20% off this weekend.  I hope you all had a great Thanksgiving!

New Adventures - Essential Etsy

As many of you have read, I have recently opened a small store on etsy.com - Gooba Gear.  I have been making and selling clothing and accessories for toddlers, tots, and goobas ;)  During my adventures on etsy I have stumbled upon a lovely group of people who are part of the team "Marketing and Promoting for Serious Sellers."   I have graciously accepted the responsibility of blogging for our team!  So come check us out on the Essential Etsy blog!

AND - I promise I will get back to blogging about my little Gooba soon!  Just to give you a sample - she has started making up her own songs at dinner time - last night's was "I love Mommy and Daddy - I love Mommy and Daddy - I love Mommy and Daddy - and Chance too."  AWWW!  Love her too!

the olive tree: GIVEAWAY! $15 dollar store credit~

the olive tree: GIVEAWAY! $15 dollar store credit~: oh hey, look another giveaway/// what's up for grabs: a $15 dollar store credit!  mandatory entries: you must be a fol...

Ever Evolving

 

Ok... I admit, it has been FOREVER since I have blogged.  School has started and Gooba is still learning a letter a week.  Her Grandparents are working with her some and we squeeze what we can in after school.  Mostly my attention has been directed at my new adventure, Gooba Gear.   I started an online store on etsy.com and have been sewing away like a crazy person.  I have made my little Gooba several adorable outfits and thought it was time to share the love.

Come check us out!  I'd love for you to visit my store Gooba Gear or visit us on Rebel Mouse or Facebook.


In our spare time, we've been spending some nice time together when we have a chance.  Taking some time to enjoy the beautiful weather













We had a wonderful day to go apple picking.  We read so many good stories leading up to the event I thought Gooba was going to burst when we arrived.   She was actually tall enough to reach some of the apples on the lower branches this year.

We paid for our apples by the pound and we allowed to eat as many apples as we wanted to.  I'm pretty sure the orchard lost some money on Gooba this year.  She ate an entire apple, including the seeds and core, and took bites our of several other apples.

We also have perfected the art of making pizza dough together, one of our favorite things to do!  Gooba loves making pizza with mommy.

I promise I'll post more pictures of my Gooba and her crafts soon and update our scrapbook page.  Thank you for your patience with me!

G,H,I Oh My!

WOW!  It's been a long time since I have posted!  I guess the end of the summer just kept us busy.  The closer we got to the start of school, the more inseparable my little Gooba and I got!  We did keep up with our letters, though not with the same intensity as the beginning of the summer.  Visiting friends and pool visit became a little more prevalent and we loved every minute.

So let's catch up to the present.  I'm officially back at work as of last week.  It was really hard on both of us, especially hard on little Gooba this year.  I think she is at the age where she understands I have to go to work, but does not understand she cannot come too.  At one point she suggested that all the kids at mommy's school should just come to our house instead.  What a sweetie.  But after a rocky week emotionally both of us seem to be at least a little bit back to our routine.

So other than being back to work we've been busy at preschool and I've been busy on a new business adventure.  Since I've enjoyed making clothes for my little Gooba so much I've decided to make a little profit off of my hobby.  This weekend I opened my very first Etsy.com store called Gooba Gear.  My shop sells toddler clothes and accessories with new items listed often since I'm a new shop.  Come check it out!



OK, back to preschool...here's a quick summary of at least the crafts that we have done for G,H, and I.  More to come on J later since that was our first school week at Grandma's house.

 

Ok so we did our usual clapper activities for G with some gorilla and some giraffe erasers - still always a favorite with Gooba.

 Then since it's one of her personal favorite books, we read Goodnight , Gorilla.  I also made her little stick puppets that match up with the animals in the story.  Then we acted out the book during a little puppet show.  This was a fun activity!

 The we did some hardcore coloring!  We colored all sorts of different sheets from different places around the web.  We attempted at times to actually make a G - not too bad!

 More coloring!  I love this above picture of her, it cracks me up.  Little Gooba hard at work!

Then we used this cute printout I found online with a giraffe and a bare tree.  Gooba had to add playdoh leaves to the tree and count them.  At first she was doing a really good job...                          

Then it turned into whatever this picture to the right is ;)

Then we did a cute giraffe lacing card that I got at Dollar Tree.  The came in a 5 pack.... SUPER CUTE!









Then it was craft time.  I forgot to take pictures before I put them in the scrapbook - whoops!  So this is the paper plate gorilla face we made.  Cute!

I drew the gum ball machine on this one and then we used finger paint and fingerprints to make the gum balls.


The giraffe head is an outline of her foot that we traced and cut out.  I cut the rest out of paper and Gooba helped me glue it together.  Then we used a paintbrush to paint the spots on the giraffe.

I think they came super cute!



Ok - so we slacked a little on H and I and crammed them all into one week.  Oh well.  And again I forgot to take any pictures until after I scapbooked.  I made a capitol and a lowercase H on the paper and cut out some little hearts and Gooba glued them on top of the letters.

We also did some hippo printables.  Sorry no pics.

And we made H houses.  Very similar to the hearts Gooba did the glueing and I cut out the rest!

This next one is one of my favorites, mostly because I actually came up with this idea myself!  I know right?!  I took the pink paper that I cut all the hearts out of for the earlier craft and we taped it to this yellow paper like a stencil.  Then Gooba sponge painted all over the paper, we peeled the stencil off, and VOILA!  Hearts :)  We made two of these and I think they both came SUPER cute :)

For I we tore up cotton balls and glued them on the I's and igloo like snow.

We also glued some of the ice cream capitol letter I's together.  I made everything and then Gooba glued them together.  We made three for some reason.

Then we did some handprint painting - one of our favorites!  I drew the ice cream cone and then we printed her hand in three different colors for our three scoops of ice cream.

Well that's a quick glimpse into our last few activities before I went to work.  The next posts should be interesting as we adjust our lives back to mommy at work!





Please visit my Pinterest page for the origin of a lot of our crafts!  Most printables were graciously borrowed from 1+1+1=1.

F is for Frantic

 So last week, and this week, we have really dropped the ball with our summer school program.  We have had a lot going on at home and just haven't had a lot of free time.  Here's what we managed to pull together for week F.  First we used Bendaroos to try an make some letters.  This didn't go great.  Gooba is just not able to manipulate the Bendaroos very well.

After Bendaroos we did some stamping.  First I just had her stamp the paper with capitol and lowercase F's since that was our letter of the week.  Then I let her use all of the stamps A-F and we named the letters for review.  She very much enjoyed this and it was a great review.  I also learned that she loves the letter B.  Good to know.

After stamping we sorted and made patterns with some firefighter cards I got from 1+1+1=1.  Gooba has a real fascination with firefighters these days.  I not sure exactly where it came from, but I suspect it was a Little Einstein's episode.


After we played with the firefighter cards she wore her firefighter helmet and we did some pretend play.  Unfortunately I don't have any pictures of this one since we were pretty into it!  AFter that we ate some fish crackers and watched the Bubble Guppies episode about firefighters.

The next day f was for fine motor.  We played with stringing beads onto pipe cleaners.  Gobba made a pretty nice bracelet out of one of them.  The one she's showing in the pictures is apparently a flower.... that starts with f!  This activity was a huge hit and we played it alot this week.

Other things we did that I didn't take a picture of were some magnet pages and some coloring pages.  We also sorted and made patterns our of some flower cards.  No crafts this week, booo!  We might have to squeeze some f and g crafts in together so we have something for our scrapbook.  I'm also behind on that!  Yikes!  I need to catch up on all of this stuff before school starts back up!  I can't start the school year behind already!

 Finally, f was for felt this week.  I spent a significant amount of time making Gooba a Quiet Book.  You can visit the link at the top of this page to see her book in more detail.  We went away for the weekend to celebrate her great grandma's 90th birthday and I wanted her to have a nice Quiet Book to play with in the car and in the hotel when there was some down time from running around with her cousins.   I'm really pleased about how well it came out considering I was rushing like crazy to get it finished.


Well there it is, our lame f week.  Unfortunately I think week g might be equally awful as we try to cram as much fun possible into what's left of our summer time together.  I'll keep you posted!

E is for Everything

 Ok, we actually did a ton this week, but I've been slacking a little with my blogging.  My apologies in advance for this extensive post!

Our first activity was glueing blue and green pom poms to match the water and the land on this Earth map.  It involved pom poms so it was a hit with little Gooba.  Understanding that we live on a planet was a little bit of a complex idea for Gooba, but she was willing to go with for the sake of crafts.

We also did a little Earth coloring page and an Earth lacing card, but frankly her attention span for both of these things was too short to warrant a photo!

Then we used this cute Little Einstein's magnet page.  She adores the Little Einsteins so this was a nice addition to E week.

Then jumping back to D week a little bit we had some nice visitors in our yard.  A mommy and two fawns played in our yard.  They ran up and down our hill about four different times.   Unfortunately Gooba was taking her nap during their visit.  Extra sad for Gooba since before she went down for her nap she asked if we could see more deer.  We had seen a deer crossing the road on our way home that day.  Maybe next time.

 Continuing with our Earth theme I tore up blue and green pieces on tissue paper and Gooba stuck them all over a round shaped piece of contact paper.  She was a big fan of this project.  After she was done adding the tissue paper we added a slightly larger second sheet of contact paper and made a nice window decoration.

This next activity was an idea I got off Pinterest. Then we drew all over a coffee filter with washable blue and green markers.  When she was done scribbling we sprayed it several times with the water bottle and the marker got all smeary.  Gooba liked this a whole bunch.  Later we glued it onto the black paper, but apparently it wasn't quite dry enough and the glue bled through the paper.  Still looks cool though.

After craft time it was time to bake some Earth muffins.  I got this idea from No Time for Flashcards but I used my own blueberry muffin recipe.  We also used neon green food coloring and I think the color came pretty good.  It's a little more green in person than in the picture.  Either way they are delicious!

Later in the week we met up with Pretty Girl and her mom from Stay at Home Adventures at their house.  First we did some coloring sheets.  Gooba was really into one of the sheets and not so much into the other.  She's so finicky about when and what she feels like coloring.  Such a little nut!

Then we rocked out to some Hokey Pokey Elmo. He was a big hit with the girls today.  Poor Elmo got his workout today!  Elmo even got to dance in their playhouse!  Notice Gooba putting her foot in... or is that out?  Either way too cute!

 Then we did some painting.  We painted Elmo heads and noses.  Once they were dry we assembled the faces together.  Both girls were great at figuring out which part of the face goes where.

 After craft time it was time for Pretty Girl's Mommy to pick up Bro Bro, so we got a little crazy.  We played hide and seek, we had races to see who could scoot across the floor on their butt the fastest, we wrestled and tickled, we snuggled and we giggled.  Super fun girls being girls!

Once we got home Gooba was ready for her nap, so I had a chance to finish this cute pillowcase dress I made for her.  When I first tried it on her she cried and said it was "too poofy."  She LOVED it once it was washed and "much less poofy."  She tried to sleep in it, but mean old mommy said no.  I'm psyched she likes it though.  I think it's adorable on her and it only cost me $7 to make!  I love me some Pinterest.  The website with the tutorial to make this dress is excellent and I highly recommend it!  The Mother Huddle has some really cute ideas on her site.

Finally, during this week of "everything" I took yet another idea from Pinterest and painted some Dollar Tree frames and added some ribbon embellishments, a little hard to see in the photo, and hung them up in Gooba's room.  Now we have a place to display her artwork in her  room.  They came super cute and she really likes them.  Awww, already starting to look like such a big girl!






All in all this has been another crazy week.  I was happy to get back to a little bit of sewing and crafting this week.  Sometimes when we put on our "Mommy hats" we forget that there's still room on our heads for our "Self Hats."  Personally I neglect myself way too much and give everything to my little girl.  My new personal goal, since Gooba is getting a little older, is to take a little more time putting on my "me hat" and my "wife hat" and start attempting to regain a little bit of myself back.  I owe it to my little Gooba to take good care of her Mommy :)  After all, I'm the only Mommy she has!


Earth printables borrowed graciously from Itsy Bitsy Learners