Handprint Hilarity

My inspiration for this project was from a friends Facebook page. It was so sweet that I just had to try it! I had seen hands done before, but I liked the idea of a print and how this one was displayed.

My first errand was to find a frame I liked. Hobby Lobby has cute "simple" frames I like, and if you go at the right time they are 50% off. My mom and I picked this one up. It had an inserted mat with 3 cut-outs, but our hands were too big for that so I had to figure out what I wanted to put the prints on. We looked at poster board and foam board and even canvas. I didn't like the idea of any of them. We found that Hobby Lobby also sells HUGE pieces of mat board for relatively cheap. I liked this idea because I could get about 3 of the right size piece from it just in case we messed up, which we did. But I'll get to that in a minute. They had lots of whites, so I picked the one I wanted. We also picked up the acrylic paint. That was the easy part.

I had Wes cut the mat board into the desired size pieces. The box cutters worked ok, but the edges would be hidden anyway, so it was fine. Next was to get Reed's hand print. Word of warning; newborns and paint do not mix. The obvious choice was to do this while he was asleep so we could paint and manipulate his hand without him fighting us. I was holding Reed while my mom had his hand. Wes painted the paint on it and then we were going to see how well it would turn out on a scrap piece of the board. The first one turned out really well. By this time, though, Reed's hand started moving. We had to do this fast, so we got the piece we wanted and went for it. Smear. Good thing I had some extra. We got another piece and SMEAR! You see, babies like to have their hands closed. As soon as we would get his hand on the board, he would try to make a fist and smear it all. Only one board to go. We had just gotten the paint on his hand when his arm slipped from my grip. Smacked himself right in the face and smeared blue paint all over it. My mom and I laughed so hard we nearly cried. Wes was not as amused. We did get him all cleaned up without him waking up, though.

I felt pretty bad after that, so we abandoned the project for the day.

We did have one good print, but it was on a small scrap. Not my vision at all. I resigned myself to use this print, cut to size, with a blue piece of tag underneath. It actually turned out pretty good and I am really happy with it. I had originally wanted to add other baby hand prints next to it for any other children God gave us, but I think I'll just make a whole new one for each child and let them keep it. I say this now, but that means I have to use paint with a baby again.....hmmmm.

The Turners