More spring flowers

In spite of the fact that there's another 2 to 4 inches of snow in our weather forecast (and, by the way, this has already been the 4th snowiest winter on record for our area), we've been seeing signs of spring everywhere.  Well, everywhere inside, that is.  That's because we're making our own!

 Those colorful things up there ^ are supposed to be flowers.  Bubby got a little happy with the paint and the glue and the "sparklies" (which is what we call sequins around here), but you can kind of see flowers in an abstract way, right?  We used the bottom of 16.9 oz water bottles to make the petals and used the caps for the centers.  Then I drew in some stems.  We got this idea from my crafting hero, Valerie--her family used 2-liter bottles.

 Once again, I felt the need to show you what I really had in mind.

 Here's another little something we got from Valerie.  First, we used water colors to paint some coffee filters (as I've mentioned before, we might as well paint on them, because we're sure not going to be using them for coffee) and allowed them to dry.  Then I cut them into flower shapes--to make them symmetrical, I folded the filters first, then scalloped the edge.  Next, I taped the flower shapes to our storm door and painted some grass, stems, and a cheery sun.  Shhh...don't tell Hubby that I painted on the glass.  Valerie assures me that it'll come off, but after the crazy crayon fiasco, I'm wondering if I was wise to take her word for it...

If you're not as brave (or crazy) as me, and don't want to paint your windows, you can do what I did on our front door.  I just used green construction paper to make a stem and a couple of leaves for Bubby's flower.

 Hey!  Guess where I got this idea from?  You're right!  My good pal, Valerie, although she's a much better artist than I am.  Those are supposed to be spring flower buds, the tree is supposed to be a branch, and the whole thing is supposed to be rotated 90 degrees...but it looked better this way.  You can check out Valerie's colorful spring branch here.

 When Camp Scarlet was in session a couple of weeks ago, the kids made these "stain glass" crosses (I came up with this idea all on my own :-)  I cut some purple paper in 1" strips and formed a cross shape on clear contact paper (it was easy to get everything lined up square because of the grid printed on the paper backing).  The kids stuck small (about 1") squares of colorful paper and tissue paper inside, then I covered the whole thing with another piece of clear contact paper.

And this cute little guy is made from Bubby's footprints.  I got this idea from my nephew's day care center, although I gotta say, after having done this with 2 kids, I'm not sure how they managed with however many kids they had!  The kids just thought it was the funniest thing that I wanted to paint their feet.  Oh, and it tickled, too.  We just cut a piece of green paper for the body and glued it down, then I drew in some antennas, although I was trying to get the kids to agree to pipe cleaner antennas.  And of course, no butterfly (at least no butterfly made in this house) would be complete without sparklies. 

So, it really doesn't matter what the weather is like outside: snow, rain, sleet.  Winter can do its thing out there, because we've got enough spring in here to hold us until the weather finally decides to agree with the calendar.

By the way, I find it deliciously ironic that the paper snowflakes that I haven't taken down yet are located on the window directly across from the wall where most of our flowers are "blooming" :-)