Back to work!

I know its been a while since I posted, but I promise I've been busy. I had lots of family visit over the holiday and got to spend some serious time with them all. I guess we'll start with the 4th of July and go backwards.

My 4th of July crafts were these beautiful spray painted candle holders. I saw them on Martha Stewart's website and just fell in love with them.

I took a quick trip to Wal Mart and picked up some clear mason jars, flat red exterior spray paint and some star stickers. JB thought I was crazy, but I trust Martha to hook me up with some ingenious holiday crafts.

I stuck the star stickers on the jars in a random arrangement. I found out later that the best results came from the stars I gave a little extra attention and made sure they were stuck down really really well.

Here are all my little jars lined up. I kept the the lids on them because I really liked the look of the clear jar tops. After spray painting I found that the clear top and the red body of the jar blended together really well.

Here are the jars after their little makeover. At this point I was very excited! I couldn't wait to peel off the stars and see the finished project. Unfortunately I got very distracted right about here and found this pretty plant on my patio that I felt NEEDED to be replanted into a nicer pot.

Aren't the lilies pretty!? They look so nice on my patio. I put them on the table I have out there so I can see them from the sun room inside. So, hours passed and suddenly my house was cleaned and my computer was organized and I even got a little bit of knitting in. The 4th of July candle holders were forgotten about. But suddenly, as the sun was going down, "OH MY GOSH! I GOTTA GO GET THE CANDLE HOLDERS!" and I ran outside, gathered them up, and brought them into the house, only to be distracted by something else. Boo. The next day I finally got my act together and peeled off all the stars and added the vanilla scented tea lights to each of them. I brought them all to my mom's house for her 4th of July party. She used them to line her deck and they ended up looking beautiful at night!

The finished product!

This was a super fun and super easy project. Really you could adapt this to just about any holiday. I used a few of them to stuff with small goodies and use as gifts for JB's mom and one for the hostess of another party we were invited to. 

Along with my candle holders I also made these cute little party favors out of card stock and tissue paper.

 

They are little rockets filled with candy! The little ones loved these things! I used a potato stamp carved into a star shape to decorate the card stock. Potato stamps are so much fun! I havn't used them since I was little, but man are they smart! I was going to buy a star stamp and it was like $10! I just could not bring myself to spend $10 on a piece of rubber shaped like a star.

These little rocket party favors were so easy and made a big impression. You just cut a piece of cardstock, glue a strip of white paper to the bottom, glue a rectangle of tissue paper to the bottom edge of the white strip, then roll up and glue it together. The top is made of a circle of paper with a small notch cut from the edge to the middle and then the two sides are overlapped creating a cone shape. I used hot glue to attach the top to the body of the rocket. After the top was on, I filled the rocket with candy and tied the tissue paper with some pretty blue ribbon.

JB and I went to 2 different Independence day parties. Both went spectacularly and all my little goodies were received extremely well. The second party doubled as a birthday party for my 2 year old cousin and my 5 year old cousin. We had 2 pinatas, and 2 cakes and twice the fun of a regular party. My dad picked up tons of fireworks, we didn't even have time to use all of them! I bet we'll have fireworks left over for a month! The bulldog in the picture is named Sam, he was my buddy the whole evening. How cute is he?!