I had the privilege of attending a retreat in 2019 hosted by Shanti Hodges and Mirna Valerio and it was transformative. I had spent almost all of my 30s juggling a long commute, being pregnant, and taking care of babies that I completely neglected my own physical, mental, and emotional health. The year I turned 40, I vowed to make my own health a higher priority and saving up money to attend this retreat was part of that.
Happy Valentine’s Day to those who celebrate! This is not a holiday we typically do anything for; feeling that’s it’s mostly driven by retail companies. That being said, creating fun valentines for school parties has become something I do look forward to each year.
This year my oldest son proclaimed “we don’t do valentines in middle school.” I rolled my eyes at him, but whatever.
At least my second grader still does valentines! We opted to go with non-food valentines again this year right when Sticker Mule was having a great sale on 3x3 inch holographic stickers. So he and I worked on a quick and fun design and I got them ordered. Have I mentioned that he loves bacon?
Next up was some kind of card to put the stickers on to give out at his party. We needed something for folks to know who these were from. I created a 4x5 inch card so I could print four on a page. I added a bacon border that matched the sticker and added his name. I had them printed and trimmed at my local Office Depot and they were ready within an hour.
I LOVE how these turned out! Here’s a breakdown of the pricing:
50 vinyl, holographic stickers, roughly 3x3 inch - on sale - $31.10 (incl tax, shipping was free)
12 pages printed on card stock (4 cards per page) and trimmed - $11.84
double-sided tape (we already had some)
Total: $42.94
That came out to $.89 cents per valentine for 48 valentines. There are only 25 kids in my son’s class, but he will also give one to his teacher, the class aides, specials teachers (music, PE, art, Spanish, etc), and the two administrative assistants. The minimum order for the deal on Sticker Mule was 50 stickers, so even if he only gave them out in his class, we’ll have leftover stickers to share with friends or I can list them in my sticker store for a few bucks.
Overall, this wasn’t crazy expensive and I love coming up with a fun way to do non-food, non-candy, allergen-free valentines.
A while back my friend, Brandi reached out to me about creating a new logo for the elementary school where she’s a teacher. It just so happens to be the same elementary school where both she and I were students back in the 1980s. The school district made some big changes last year, and one of them included a new name for our old school and I was asked to help them with a new logo.
It has been such fun to be part of the process to rebrand MY elementary school.
They had students submit hand-drawn concepts for the logo and the school committee (made up of teachers and the principal) chose one as a conceptual starting-off point for me. That drawing involved a howling coyote with beams of light in a circle around it. The landscape I created in the background is a portion of Coyote Hills Regional Park that the school is named after. I grew up hiking in those hills and going there on field trips!
It was a fun process taking that student’s artwork and turning it into a professional logo and I’m really happy with the final concept. I sent them multiple versions of this logo in one color, two colors, and three colors. That way they have multiple options in the event they want to print on t-shirts or make stickers.
Thanks so much for this fun opportunity!!
April’s holiday card for this past year was pretty awesome and I love how it turned out. She convinced her son to post in a bathrobe holding a soda can and I went to work in Photoshop to turn him into Uncle Eddie from National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation.
I was able to include their two dogs in there as well and it was so much fun to work on. It was actually an interesting challenge to get the photos to match since any photos I could find of this scene from the film were quite grainy.
What a fun and hilarious idea for a holiday card, thank you, April!
I have had so much fun creating valentines for my kids’ elementary school Valentine’s Day parties. Every year I expect them to ask for cartoon-branded, big box store valentines and every year they surprise me by wanting something custom-made by their mom.
I have made three of these valentines available for purchase in my Etsy shop. See below for instructions on how to order. This post contains a few affiliate links. Shopping through these links earns me a few cents and it’s greatly appreciated to keep my little business running.
Airplane-themed valentines! These are about 8x2.5 inches after they’ve been folded in half. They are designed to be stapled to snack-size baggies filled with valentine treats. You can consider sending non-candy, non-food, and allergen-free valentines to school and order foam airplane kits like pictured. You can order them from Amazon here. Just staple to the top of the poly bags. These were a HUGE hit in my kids’ classes last year. I add their salutation to the back written in “clouds”.
Expo Marker Valentines! These were our valentines for 2021. We opted to go non-edible again and gave each classmate a dry erase marker; which was a hot commodity that school year. For their teachers, they got a Ziplock back with 6 Expo markers and 4 Sharpies. The cards are set up 4 to a page and there is enough space to adhere a thick or thin dry erase marker to the card with double-stick tape or washi tape. Choose from four different color schemes. You can buy dry erase markers from Amazon or your local Costco or Sam’s Club.
Fishing Themed Valentines! These were so much fun to create. My boys love fishing; my oldest especially. So it was only fitting to opt for a fishing-themed valentine. These are approximately 8x2.5 inches when folded in half. I turn your child into a fishing cartoon and after these are trimmed and folded in half, they can easily be stapled to a snack-size Ziplock bag. You can go sandwich-size if you’d like. Fill these with Goldfish crackers, Swedish fish, or maybe gummy worms.
When I create new valentines, I’ll try to add them to my shop if they’re worth it. Happy Valentine’s Day!
Happy New Year!! I have lots of fun things planned for 2022 in my little world of painting and drawing, and I cannot wait to see how they evolve in the coming months.
My oldest son is 12 and he has aspirations to be a YouTube content creator someday… like many kids his age. He occasionally watches videos that give advice on social media marketing and asked me if I’d ever written a “Fun Facts” post. I haven’t, but figured I’d start the new year with a blog post and see how many I could come up with.
So here goes…
1. My son and I both tested for a Kukkiwon 1st degree black belt in taekwondo in October of 2021 and we both PASSED! It was really, really hard; both physically and mentally, but I’m so proud of both of us. I wrote much longer posts about my taekwondo journey and the test itself that you can read if you’re interested. We’ll get our black belts and certificates some time in early 2022 since they come from Korea.
2. I never developed a taste for coffee; not even coffee ice cream, and it took me until my 40s before I could enjoy a Frappuccino without cringing at the coffee flavor that most don’t even notice. I do enjoy a Frappuccino now and then and actually like the tiny coffee flavor now, so I wonder if I will eventually like coffee?
3. I hate roller coasters. They are not fun or exhilarating for me and I hate the feeling of falling or being dizzy. I will never skydive or bungee jump willingly. I even get a little anxiety when I fly if there’s any turbulence, but I love to travel, so I don’t let it stop me from exploring when I can.
4. I took the class to become a soccer referee when I was 15 in an effort to earn a little money and maybe give me an edge as a player. I ended up being pretty good at it and the year I turned 17, I earned the title of Region IV Youth Referee of the Year; one of the top 4 female referees in the US under age 24. I got to travel to some big tournaments as a result; including the US Youth Soccer National Championships as a guest. I got to referee games with FIFA referees Brian Hall and Kari Seitz. Two years later, my brother earned the same honor and went a step further being chosen as National Youth Referee of the Year.
5. I spent 30+ years hating avocados; gross texture and flavor. It wasn't until I was pregnant with my youngest in 2014 that I started to like them and now I love them. Weird!
Goofy camp counselors. Made some amazing friends.
6. When I was 18, I had a job at a Girl Scout camp where I lived there all summer curating the arts & crafts program. My camp name was Batty; named after the cartoon bat from the movie Fern Gully. I have no recollection why I chose that name. I do remembering thinking bats were cool (still do) and maybe I couldn’t think of any other camp name, so it stuck. I had so much fun at that job that I dream of getting to do it again someday.... even though I would be 15-25 years older than ALL of the other staff members and the pay is pretty terrible. I even remember the words to most of the Girl Scout songs I learned growing up.
7. My maiden name is Tebow and my family is supposedly, distantly, related to the NFL player with the same last name. Not sure how we’re related, but his fame helped the rest of the country learn how to say Tebow correctly.
8. My husband and I dated for almost 10 years before we got married and it was mostly due to economics. When we both were in college, rent was already getting crazy in the San Francisco Bay Area, so we both stayed living at home well into our 20s. Neither of us wanted to spend a bunch on rent and have it keep us from being able to buy a house. Also, in 2001 we had 6 weddings to either attend or be part of, so we were OVER weddings for a long time. We finally got married in the fall of 2007.
Selfie in Lake Tahoe BEFORE there was even a word for a selfie… with a regular camera too!!
9. I am mostly left-handed, but ambidextrous with my feet; which comes in handy when playing soccer and in martial arts. I write, draw, paint, and eat with my left hand, but I brush my teeth and use scissors with only my right hand. I use tools like a screwdriver or hammer with both hands. I have never met anyone who has similar ambidextrous quirks.
10. I am a recipient of the Girl Scout Gold Award; the highest award someone can get in Girl Scouting as a youth. It’s the equivalent of the Eagle in Boy Scouting. My Gold Award Project involved painting a few murals in the hallways of my high school and polling the student body on whether they thought it could prevent vandalism and graffiti. I am also a Lifetime Member. These photos here show two of the first small wall paintings I did in the hallways of my high school. On the left I painted my friend Jamila and just across that hallway, she painted me. Then I did a version of Picasso’s Three Musicians. For my Gold Award Project I painted a really large piece of masonite (maybe 4x6 feet? I can’t remember) that ended up being hung in the main office. It had an earth in the middle and a bunch of faces of teenagers of different ethnicities around it. I'm kinda bummed I don’t have a photo of it finished… but also not that sad, because I’ve always been a better landscape painter, ha!
If you know me, were any of these new info to you??
I realized that I never shared my family’s holiday card from 2020. It was an interesting year for sure. It was also the first year we opted to skip the professional photos with Santa that we’d been doing for the past six years and instead we just put my iPhone on a tripod and took photos in our bedroom. It was a year of unintended togetherness and we all survived. The photo quality wasn’t great, but it kind of fit for how 2020 went.
On the back I shared a bit about what we were all up to during the year.
This year I really wasn’t sure what I wanted to do. 2021 was a year of road trips for us since my husband spent the whole year on sabbatical, so we traveled during every school break and a few times during the summer. Then the second half of the year was dedicated to my oldest and I training for our taekwondo black belt test.
So we decided to have our travels be the focus of our holiday card this year. I put together a collage of Polaroid photos from some of our adventures and then the back listed some of the highlights of our year and a salutation.
The photo on the back was taken at Sand Hollow State Park by the amazing Arika Bauer from Zion Adventure Photog. She took wonderful family photos for us just after Christmas last year and I adore how they turned out. If you’re ever in southern Utah and want some fantastic photos to document your travels, or even just a beautiful backdrop for family photos, give her a call. She works great with kids and she’s even done engagements and proposals.
Both this year and last year, I had my cards printed at my local Office Depot. They’ve done a good job every time I’ve had something printed and they get it done quickly; usually done the same day. When I have the time to place an online order, I usually go with Overnight Prints.
Here’s to getting further through a pandemic and hopefully moving closer to a life that’s closer to the normal we had before. Happy New Year!
A while back I bought a box of little wood slices with the intention of painting them all with little landscapes and giving them as gifts. If I could get enough of them painted before Black Friday, I was considering selling them to hopefully make a few bucks before Christmas. It was mid November before I painted any, so yeah, I think I’ll have to buy another box and try again for next year.
Instead of stressing over getting a bunch of ornaments painted and shipped before Black Friday, I prepped all of them with Watercolor Ground and had the kids who joined us for Thanksgiving paint them. Ages ranged from 4 to 18 and they went to town making some really awesome ornaments. I brought Tombow markers, some inexpensive acrylic paint, and a set of iridescent watercolor that was on sale. I was so proud that they all had fun and spent a good amount of time painting their ornaments on Thanksgiving. It was a great activity for them to all do together that wasn’t a video game.
Watercolor Ground is a painting medium that can be painted onto porous surfaces to allow them to be painted with watercolor or gouache paint. I applied two coats to each of the wood slices and it allowed the wood to behave a little like watercolor paper. It’s not nearly as absorbant and you do get some bleeding or weirdness from the grain of the wood, but it’s overall a much easier surface to paint on than if I’d just painted on raw wood.
Of course I had to paint one wood piece to see how it would turn out and made this little painting of Half Dome from Yosemite National Park. I LOVED how it turned out. The medium doesn’t behave exactly like watercolor paper, but it’s close enough to make for some fun little paintings. On this one I used a combination of watercolor, gouache, and water-based brush pens. I made a TikTok video showing this process that you can see here.
I had so much fun with that first ornament that I had to make another one… or a couple more.
This time I tried for an epic sunset at Joshua Tree National Park. With the sunset I tried harder to get more of the look of a watercolor wash. The paint doesn’t blend quite as well as it does on paper, but I was happy with what I was able to achieve. Then I used gouache and brush pens for the trees and foreground. What a fun and unique park to explore! Here’s is the TikTok video I made of the process.
The next one I did was a Christmas gift for my son’s 2nd grade teacher. She has two parrots and my son had the genius idea to paint her beautiful birds onto one of these ornaments. He sent her an email asking which breeds they are (Blue Fronted Amazon and Solomon Island Eclectus) and she sent him a few photos. I was more than happy to paint them onto the little piece of wood and he wrote his name on the back. You can view the TikTok video here.
The next ornament I made for my sister of Babylon Arch. She and I hiked to this beautiful arch in southern Utah last year while we were both on a women’s retreat. It’s such a magical place with beautiful views of the Virgin River and gorgeous Navajo sandstone. For this ornament I used gouache for the whole thing. It’s been fun to re-remember how to use gouache, get the right consistency, and how to layer to get the affect I want. Here you can view the TikTok video.
For the last ornament I made this year, I made this scene from Coyote Gulch for my friend Michelle. She and I, along with another rad woman, backpacked to Coyote Gulch this past spring. I wrote a long blog post about it earlier this year. The third night of our trip, we camped under this alcove and it was such an epic camping spot. Here’s the TikTok showing this ornament’s progress.
Making these ornaments has been such a joy this fall that I'm planning to order more wood slices and then spend the spring and summer next year painting a stock of them that I will sell online and locally. I am hoping to get into some local arts and crafts fairs and festivals next year selling prints and stickers, so maybe I can sell some of these ornaments there too.
What are some epic locations you’d like to see painted on an ornament?
