Saturday, December 21, 2013

Kids Make The Best Presents EVER!


Okay, so I am super excited to share with you my daughter Ruby's Christmas gift for my husband this year. While I helped her implement it, she came up with THE WHOLE IDEA HERSELF and it turned out so cute! She is besides herself with excitement. So proud of her! Her Daddy is gonna LOVE it!

So here is how the conversation went with my 6 year old after my hubs tucked her in one night:

Ruby: I love my Daddy. He's the best!
Me: Me too, Rubes.
Ruby: We should do something nice for him. (pause for thinking) and then...
I KNOW!
LIGHT BULB!!!!
Let's make him a great Christmas present! We'll make him a football field cause he like football and we'll take his picture and put HIM on it!
Me: What a great idea! We'll take his picture tomorrow!
Ruby: Okay, but mommy this is MY shoot so I get to be the boss this time, okay?
(LOL, the kid knows me so well. I am always setting up shoots around here.)

So, the next day she asked him to put on his Eagles jersey and told him how to pose while I took a few shots and then she took a couple herself. (To make sure they were just right). I had them blown up and let her choose her favorites. Here is how we made the craft:

1. First we cut a piece of cardboard into a rectangle.
2. Then we glued a piece of green construction paper on top of it - cut to the same size.
3. With a white crayon, she drew the lines of the field.
4. We didn't have any brown construction paper left so she drew (and colored in) a brown football
on white card stock and then cut it out.
5. Next, she cut out 3 Daddy "players"out of the pics.
6. We hot glued a nut onto a washer for the stands and use bamboo skewers (cut in half) to glue onto the back of each photo.
7. For the goal post, we broke yellow painted dowels into the right size (trimmed the ends with scissors) and glued together. I wasn't sure if they would hold so we backed it up with a little green wire wrapped around the corners.
8. We painted an empty thread spool and painted it red. (Ruby's idea. I pay no attention to football whatsoever, but she said it should be red so red it was!)
9. After it dried, we filled all of our "stands" with hot glue and put our photo-Daddy's and the goal post in them.
10. Last, we hot glued the goal post to the field. We left the "players" free standing so they could be moved for play.

I love how it turned out. So much, in fact, I'm thinking it would be super cute for a family gift sometime with a few men in the family "playing" each other on the field! I'm also thinking that maybe I could use a magnet between the layers of cardboard and green paper so that the players would be stuck there, but not permanently. So many fun options! Hope you enjoyed this craft!

 Close up of the 3 Daddy pics she chose. I absolutely love the silly face he's making on the 2nd one.
Wishing you and yours a super fun holiday!!

Jen