Grandparents' Day Gift - The Tutorial (of Sorts.)

As most moms do, I like giving picture gifts of Delaney to her grandparents for holidays. Fun for me, and something I know they will enjoy. This year, now that Delaney is a little older and can get in on the fun, I thought it would be a fun idea to pick up some frames that she could fingerpaint and use some pictures from her two year shoot by Paul Wharton.

This was a blast! By the way, I use the word "tutorial" loosely in this title, as I'm fairly certain most of my readers understand how to have a child fingerpaint a frame and stick a picture in it. A more aptly titled post would be "Grandparents' Day Gift - Pictures of My Cute Kid Painting." But tutorial sounds exciting and like you might actually learn something, right?

Right.

Moving on, I picked up two unfinished picture frames at Wal-Mart, and actually got my two prints there too, as I needed them sooner than Shutterfly would deliver. (Side note: You can pick up Shutterfly prints at Target, but only glossy, and this gal prefers matte for framing.) We already had our fantastic Crayola washable finger paint. Next up was stripping down Delaney, protecting the table, and letting her have at it!

She was a little hesitant at first, being the neat and tidy girl she (sometimes) is...

 

 Using a different finger for each color here. Daddy had to help a little to get her going.

Now the artist is at work. Check out this masterpiece in the making!

 

 The face says it all. I die of cuteness.

After the artist was in the bath, I let these babies dry in the garage, and after using a paint pen to write a little note on the back of each, we sanded the sides down a little and then threw a few coats of poly on these to make sure they wouldn't trap dust. Rustoleum won out for a very important reason - it was sitting on the garage shelf already, as its what we used on our DIY kitchen table.

A shot of the drying process. As you can see, its very important to have high quality tools, like a Pampers box drying rack for your art.

 

Here are the finished products. Don't they look great? See how much Delaney's grandparents loved them on the reveal post tomorrow!