Father's Day gift

You know how they say necessity is the mother of all invention? Ok, so Thorstein Veblen actually said it.  The rest of us are just biting his style. Anyway, necessity may be the mama to the light bulb, but poverty is the mother of all sappy sentimental gift giving. Think about it. Who gives "chore gift certificates" and handmade painted clay giraffes? Those jobless bums called children.

Well, this past Father's Day I joined their ranks and crafted up a "special present" for my husband. As most of us do these days, we squeak about on a tight budget so a home fabricated creation was on the agenda!

Let me start this off by saying this project was a truckload of fun to do. It started in front of my puter sorting through a years worth of adorableness. I spent days looking at pictures of my two favorite guys trying to find ones my big guy would enjoy the most. They were the tiny little special moments that happened on ordinary days. Sweet, sweet memories. After I picked out a few I aged them up in iphoto and printed them on a beige colored card stock. Instead of cutting them out, I tore the edges to give it more of an old fashioned feel. I got a nice cheap canvass and a package of cool letter & number scrapbooking sticker things from Michaels. I'm lucky my good friend and neighbor is an art teacher. She lent me some acrylic paint and a couple of lovely stamps (tall grass and dandelions - dandelions have "meaning" in our home). If you aren't so lucky, you can usually score some great coupons for Michaels and load up!

I mixed the paints to come up with a slate blue and slathered it over the canvass. I was going for texture and I got it! The peaks and valleys of the paint really gives a lovely depth to the project. Then I stamped the tall grass and dandelions in brown all along the bottom. After way too much time manuevering the pictures about to find "just the right spot", I glued them down and covered the whole shebang in hodge podge. It is at this point I will not so humbly state that it turned out great! My man loved it!!! It was a total surprise and even choked him up a bit. It was such a success he promptly hung it up in our home office. Fait acompli!!!!

Here are a couple of pics. One is as it's being assembled the other is post giving. Hope you enjoi! I would love to see some of your sappy sentimental answers to gift giving on a shoe string budget! You know holidays hit us pretty regularly all year long. Need to stock pile the ideas!