Gift giving can be challenging these days especially with coronavirus still a part of our daily reality. So we made these handmade gifts but delivered them to our loved ones in a unique way that even COVID-19 couldn’t stop. I am always partial to a special homemade gift no matter the season we are in, if we can swing it.
For us, we have moms and grandmas we celebrate for Mother’s Day but none of them are in state at the moment. Couple that with the difficulty of shopping and even ordering gifts (when you procrastinate like I apparently did), and we had to get creative. So I saw these ideas for a handprint heart and “tweet” hearts footprints by craftymorning.com on Pinterest and ran with it.
Here’s what we did and how we kicked it up a notch for gifting from home.
- First take a white sheet of finger paint paper and made sure it was a size for a standard photo frame. We had 12 x 18″ finger paint paper that I cut in half to make a 9 x 12″ to be easily framed with a simple gallery frame like this.
- Cut a heart out of the same size sheet of paper and tape it to the center of your work surface over the first sheet. (Don’t stick any tape to the first sheet just seal the second like an envelope down over it.)
- Mix a different paint color for each of your children to use for their handprints. I used the tempera paint we usually use for painting with the kids but slightly watered down to layer nicely. This paint also makes me much less stressed when painting and happier to do projects like these more often. 😉
- If you have younger children like I do, have one child do his handprints while the others play. I found it easiest to get that child started cleaning up with a little hand wash (and foot bath if you do the “tweet” hearts craft too) and towels I had already set up in the bathroom while we moved onto the next child. Make sure to hold the top layer of paper down as the children (or you) lift their hands.
- Gently untape the top sheet of paper with out smearing the paint on the bottom sheet and remove to reveal your beautiful handprint heart.
- Scan in the print after it dries and upload it to a standard photo size art board in Photoshop or other photo editing software. You can even do this by just taking a photo with your smart phone. Why this step you ask? I knew I probably would not be able to get the original painted heart to the recipient in time so I decided to make it digital and attach it to an electronic gift.
- Add the text in whatever font you choose and type in your message. I used “all our little fingers can’t count the way we love you”
- Add the artwork to your gift or card. Panera Bread does e-gift cards which you can customize by uploading your own image. So I purchased a Panera Bread e-gift card and uploaded this image for it. Then in the message I explained that my boys had made the handprint heart and that the original would be in the mail soon.
For the “tweet” hearts footprints, we did it in a very similar way taking turns with each child. And once I had the footprints on the sheet of paper where I wanted them, I let our kids work on their own paintings while I finished up painting the little birds. Then I added the text with this gold paint pen after the rest of the paint has dried.
I found this great little poster hanging frame on Amazon which is going to look awesome in my mom‘s new art studio. And it fits the finger paint paper size perfectly! These came out great in short order and we can’t wait to gift them to our moms/grandmas!
Have fun creating!
