Handprint and footprint art is all over pinterest, how hard could it be to recreate? Well we tried to take some foot prints and hand prints when Lucky was 10 days old, and we ended up with ink everywhere and never got a decent print.
I found a picture of a three tiered wall hanging that I really wanted to recreate. The set featured footprint ghosts, handprint spiders and footprint Frankenstein monsters. (It can often be hard on Pinterest to find the original article featuring the craft versus someone who borrowed pictures from a bunch of different sites. I try hard to link back to the original. In this case the original source was not linked.)
Of course, the first step is to paint the canvas background. I planned to do two coats of the color on each creating one Orange and two Black canvases. Looking closely at the original I realized that I was missing some yellow paint, I will need to pick that up on my next trip to the craft store.
The first coat of paint went on nice and thick. I've found that some of the craft smart paints can be pretty thin so certain colors may need multiple coats but with the black and Orange I should be fine with two coats total. I am doing the painting on packing paper on my carpeted third floor because the toddler and puppy rarely come up here and this way I don't have to lose my dining room table for hours waiting for things to dry. Hopefully I got no splatter on the carpet!
When it was time to to do the handprints and food prints I was nervous. I thought it was going to be a messy disaster with a crying toddler. Boy was I wrong! We started off with some tests on construction paper to get a sense of the paint thickness I should paint onto Lucky's feet. We had Lucky in the high chair and Keith was present to keep Lucky from kicking me with a painted foot. Lucky LOVED having his foot painted and kept saying "foot foot" as we were practicing.
The practices were helpful to see the pressure and how we had to align his apendages. For his hands we painted them and Keith held them from behind to keep him from panting everything. Lucas LOVED making hand prints and seeing the results after touching the paper or canvas, and kept requesting to do more. I know that this is only the beginning of the hand/foot print art that we will do in this household.
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| LAB Hand and foot prints at almost 23 months old |
For the final embellishments, I started with the decoration types shown in the original photo and then became more confident and branched out a bit on my own. I love my mini pumpkins surrounding the ghosts, even if my spacing isn't quite so even. I added a date about the monster feet so that in 30 years we'll know which child created these prints and how old the munchkin was.
Finally, I had to add the ribbon ties to the project. This is the last step, and I'm surprisingly a little nervous.
I cut the 5/8" x 3 yard ribbon into two equal pieces. I wanted to make sure there was enough ribbon on top to trim to the bow/hanger I wanted. Then I spaced the canvases and used Elmer's glue to secure the ribbon to the canvases ~2" away from either end. I was more concerned with the ribbons being taught between the canvases versus on a canvas itself.
It was so hard to wait for the glue to dry. I wanted to just flip over the canvases and see how the ribbon looks but I didn't want to mess it up. Patience is not one of my virtues, but I'll try to wait it out.
