Mother's & Father's Day Mugs

Sorry to those of you who tune in for triplet updates... this is one is merely about hand/foot prints.
I have noticed in the past few months that at least half of the traffic on our blog each day is due to people stumbling across us in search engines after searching something about hand and/or footprints art projects (it kind of makes me laugh!). I had no intention of making this blog about anything other than our family's navigation through the world with triplets, but I also want to make it the most meaningful/useful to our readers. So... I have added some direct links over to the right hand side of our blog that will take our readers directly to a specific project.

While doing so, I remembered that I have never blogged about the Mother's and Father's Day mugs that I have made in the past.
I started out by making my mom, Jason's mom and myself a mug for the first Mother's Day after Quin was born (she was just 7 and a half weeks). We have a local paint your own pottery place, Paint A Pot, where I purchased the un-fired mugs. They let me bring home all of the paints/supplies. I found it difficult to paint not knowing exactly how the coloring would turn out, and it was tricky to paint on the rough ceramics. With that in mind, they still turned out okay.
I tried to use her finger to make the dragon fly, but it didn't work - so I tried to free hand/fix it. I did use her fingertips to make the caterpillar on the handle. Inspired by the first mugs, I did the same for Mother's Day after the triplets were born. I each of their footprints as the flower stems, and Quin's fingerprints for each of the flower blossom. Because the babies' feet were so small, I was able to fit three flowers on each mug.

I also made Jason a mug for Jason's first Father's Day. Unfortunately I didn't use a dark enough color for the angel's body (which was made from Quin's footprint). It is faintly visible when looking at the actual mug, but not so much on film :( Her handprints were the wings.

On a similar note... we made the woman who watches our kids a birthday card! I painted the palm of each child's hand a different color and their fingers yellow. I added the frosting and flames after the base was dry.

I love the way Gianna's cupcake turned out!

I hope this is helpful to those of you out there searching for some fun memories to help preserve your own kiddos hand/footprints forever. I LOVE getting out some of their old projects - it is amazing how fast their little hands/feet grow!