We’s is Pastin’ Ya’ll!

Sorry. I’m watching Coal Miner’s Daughter, my accents done gone and thickened up on me all of a sudden. No, not really, but I do love movies that take place in the country because most of the time the characters sound like people from home…

Anyway, this week’s craft cost me absolutely nothing to make. I didn’t have to go and buy anything at all. Everything was already in the house, and when I can come up with a craft that I don’t have to go buy anything to do, and Bubba gets to do it with me, that sounds like a good time! So, back to what we did this week. In our spare bathroom, or Bubba’s bathroom as the case may be, hangs this picture.

These are my husband’s, mine and Bubba’s hands traced and cut out in construction paper. It’s kind of a simple thing, but it is our family, and since Bubba doesn’t have a playroom here to hang it in like it was at the old house, it’s hanging in the guest bath. So to add with the construction paper art, I thought that a collage type thing would be cute on another wall in there.

Problem was, I didn’t have any glue here at the house. So I got on the internet and found out how to MAKE MY OWN GLUE! The recipe is as follows:

Homemade Glue

• 1 cup flour
• 1 1/2 cup water
• 1/3 cup sugar
• 1 tsp vinegar

All you do is add all of the ingredients in a sauce pan on medium heat and stir until thick! It looks like this when it’s done.

Home made glue ya’ll!

It looks like instant mashed potatoes if you ask me, but it didn’t cost me a dime and I know exactly what went in it, that way if Bubba were to try to eat some, I wouldn’t be worried. There’s nothing in there that can harm him, and the best part of all, IT WORKS! I was skeptical, but it really does work. I tested it out on some newspaper before we made our collage. By the way, if you store it in an airtight container, it will last about a week outside of the fridge. The lady who wrote the recipe said that she keeps hers in the fridge and has had her current batch in there for about 6 months. I just put ours in an old Alfredo sauce jar.

So anyway, for Bubba’s bathroom, I found an old picture frame that went with the one that was already in there. I had one in a box that was packed away in the spare room. I took some construction paper and tore it into little bits for us, and I found a black sheet of construction paper for us to paste everything to. I folded it down to size so I knew it would fit our 8X10 frame. After that I wrote a big “P” on it so we would have some lines to guide us as we glued. The “P” is for our last name, I thought a monogram type thing would be cute.

Our bits of paper

So this afternoon we sat outside in the wonderful, glorious sunshine and glued until we had our letter as big as I wanted it. Bubba did fairly well helping, but he was more enthralled with the new box of crayons I bought him at the store today, so it was mostly me. Here’s our finished collage.

So from here, I filled it in a bit more and let it dry good. After that I trimmed all of the excess black paper off because I didn’t want it to be noticeable in the picture frame, since our hands are the only things in the frame other than the black backing.

So here she is, all framed up and ready to go on the wall. And here it is hung up in Bubba’s bathroom.

I think it’s pretty cute!

And here you can kind of see it along with the hand prints. Bubba really seemed to like the idea of being able to stick things together, so I think I’m going to start hold onto all of our ads and newspapers to see if we can’t come up with some other sort of collage project. Maybe one day when we’re out walking we’ll pick up some leaves and things along the way and make a nature collage. Who knows?