a springtime project... birds and nests...

the other day when we made salt dough flowers, 

there was a nice size amount of dough left... enough for each of the girls to make a little bird...

{maizie's}

{marina's}

they finally had the chance to paint them today... we went outside to enjoy the weather and they did some painting at the picnic table...

then... i remembered these little nests that i pinned from here quite a while ago... i thought they would make the perfect nest for their birds...

we shredded some paper lunch bags...

covered a bowl with tin foil to use as the basic shape for the nest...

 cut small pieces of the brown bag to use as the base layer...

and used mod podge to attach the paper to our form...

once that part was finished... we took our paper shred and added texture to the outside of the nest...

marina thought it would be cute to add some yarn snippets to the outside as well... 

once they were all dry... we carefully removed the tin foil... added some filler... 

and in went the little bird...

a cute addition to the nests...

the girls had fun with this project... these will be a favorite springtime decoration of mine for years to come!

have a happy day~
angie

linking up with:

fun with salt dough...

we woke up yesterday morning to MORE snow... 

the amount of snow that we've had in ohio this year hasn't been so bad... however the duration of its stay is getting beyond ridiculous...  i'm really over it... i need some sunshine in my life...

the girls actually had a snow day yesterday... yep... march 25th and a snow day... so... of course, the morning started off with "what are we going to do today?"

there were plenty of things i could have been... and should have been doing but i took some time and made up a batch of salt dough... {i remember making christmas ornaments out of that dough when i was little with my mom and grandma... little trees and candy canes... it was a fun memory...}

we went through our cookie cutters and decided flowers would be cute to make so that's just what we did...

here is the recipe for salt dough that we used:

1 cup of flour

1/2 cup of salt

1/2 cup of water

once the dough was kneaded well, i rolled it out to approximately 1/4" thick...

we then began stamping the flower shapes into the dough...

we used the medium and small flower cutters that we had...

see that straw in the photo above?  we used that to cut out a little hole at the top of each of the flowers... {i forgot to take a photo of that step... oops...}

we lined a baking sheet with tin foil and placed our flower cut-outs on it...

and placed them into the oven which was preheated to 250 degrees...

we let them bake for 2 hours...

once they were out and completely cool... the girls had fun painting them...

they used 2 shades of aqua, green, red, pink and white... {the same colors of the washi tape bunting that i made for across our fireplace...}

{love messes like this... that table has seen many projects... can ya tell?...}

{adding some details...}

{fun colors...}

{the whole bunch...}

{a close-up...}

these were super fun to make... i'm not quite sure what we'll do with them yet... i'm thinking either string them into a garland... or maybe hang them from bakers twine or ribbon from some branches... maybe in the milk bottles on our mantel once our tulips are gone...

have a happy day~

angie


linking up with...