Mommy and Me Craft: Painted Thank You Cards

This post is slightly belated, but I wanted to shared with you how The Wubie and I came up with some nifty Thank-You cards for his two swimming instructors this year. These precious teens are swim team members who volunteer their time over the summer to teach special needs children basic swimming and water safety.

In projects like this I try to incorporate as many of The Wubie's skills as possible so that the gift is especially from him.

We started with a large (12"x16") sheet of Canson Canva-Paper.

I love this stuff because it is thick and textured and can take the harsh treatment of The Wubie's more aggressive scrubbing paint strokes.

We used acrylic paint in shades of blue and aqua to simulate water. We also used this as a teaching opportunity to learn more gentle and longer painting strokes.

After the paint dried (the next day) we created two cards by dividing the paper in half, cutting it and folding the two halves in the middle.  

Next we created two sets of 'swimming pool divider floats' using plastic beads and fine gauge wire. The Wubie is an expert beader. 

We attached the beads by cutting two notches in the approximately halfway down card and taped the loose wires on the inside.



The insides were decorated with stickers depicting sea creatures. This also served to hide the wires and cover some of the paint splatters.  

The Wubie LOVES stickers!



This project was the perfect use for some bad school pics from the end of the year.  They apparently had to put him in his backup clothes so his nice outfit wasn't in the picture. Nevertheless, the faces were usable so I cut out two circles.  I had the idea to make them resemble portholes of sorts. 

The Wubie used a glue stick (less messy) to attach the photos. Oh, and we added some sea creature stickers to the front and back of the cards as well.



We were on a time crunch. So instead of portholes exactly, we covered the raw edges of the photos with a bead of blue glitter glue. Life lesson: Everything's better with glitter glue!



The insides were finished with a handwritten note. I think those are more personal, even with a handmade card it's a nice touch. Then The Wubie signed his name. Which he is very good at.



The final step was gluing the "Thank You's" and names with the glue stick after printing a cool font in a matching shade of blue. This was a bit of a shortcut as well, but as you might have noticed The Wubie was already in his swim-shorts at this point and it was time to GO!