Mothers Day gift idea

I like to give the grandparents keepsakes for Mothers/Fathers Day from the kids.  I personally LOVE them, so this year I treated myself and made one for me as well.  I wanted to make something they could actually use and may be even be a positive effect on the environment.  We slowly switching over to canvas bags when we go grocery shopping so I thought this would be great to give as a gift.

I bought ours at Walmart, 3 bags for $6 which I'm sure aren't environmentally friendly made.  Amazon has some great ecobags:

They also have a pack of 5 100% cotton bags for $19.96 100% Cotton Canvas Grocery/Multipurpose Tote Bag 5 Pack, Shoulder Length Handles  which is great if your doing this with a playgroup like we did!  Since we were making 3 bags for just us, the Walmart 3 pack worked out fine.

We used regular fabric paint and fabric paint pens for this craft -  You can buy puffy paint if you'd like more dimension for almost the same cost.

The supplies you see here are: Wipes to get the paint of ASAP - it dried very quickly onto your hands so wash off quickly!  Fabric markers, Fabric paints, Paint brushes, T-shirt, and Canvas Bag

 I painted the kids hands with the fabric paint and arranged them like a garden on the bag.

I did the same with the t-shirt.  I lined the bags and t-shirts up in a sort of assembly line and kept refreshing the paint on their hands after each mark.

I was surprised my 1year old did as well as she did with putting down her hands 4 times!  It may have helped that she was working on a Ritz cracker but I still think she did great.  These were super easy to make and I've already used my mother's day gift twice!

Painting with Ice Popsicles to learn about colors

I've tried to make the kids homemade ice pops with the inexpensive holders to give them something healthier then imitation flavor and chemical dyes.  So far I haven't gotten the best results.  I'm hoping when it warms up this year I can try again and actually be successful!  But what to do with them now?

The girls are really enjoying learning the Spanish words for colors and are asking me how colors are made.  I took our food coloring and put 3 drops each in the Popsicle tray.  I filled them with water and froze them for about 2 hours. 

I cut our butcher paper down to fit into a brownie pan to keep the food dye off my table.  Both girls were given red, blue, yellow, and green Popsicles.  BeBe tried to eat hers immediately while GG watched and laughed at her.  After I cleaned up BeBe we began to make our art!

The next day they were asking to do it again!  So feeling brave I just put the paper down onto our table and let them go for it. 

Just as I thought, it went straight through to the table!  Simple Green got most of it up really well so it wasn't such a tragedy after all.