Family Tree Mother's Day Craft

I'm unnecessarily excited about this craft!  I really am not artistic so to have anything I make turn out this beautiful just makes me very happy.  I have see so many of these hand cut-out crafts (like this one on Tres French Hens), I'm not sure where I saw it first.

I knew that tracing and cutting out would work so much better for us than paint because: 1. It's hard to get Papi, myself and Chiquis in a crafting state of mind at the same time. 2. We don't have to get a perfect print, a wobbly-traced hand can be fixed in cutting.  Paint is not forgiving.

Number 2 was especially true for Chiquita's hands.  Even though she stayed beautifully still while I traced her hand it was very wobbly, her little fingers are too easy to accidentally move.  I actually traced out hands onto scrap paper and then taped the paper to the back of scrapbook paper, then cut out.  Again, I wanted to be able to do more than one tracing if we needed to without messing up paper.

Everyone picked a different shade of green for our tree.  I cut out a little brown trunk and added a heart cut from an old greeting card.  Like I said, I was really happy with how it turned out!  The best part was I decided to color copy it since I liked it so much to keep a copy and give to my MIL.  The color copies came out as good or better than the original!  Yeah!

I just mailed off a framed one for my mom today so hopefully she won't read this blog post until it gets there!

Happy Mother's Day this weekend to all you wonderful mother's out there!  As a daughter I know that even when you do your absolute best you'll go through times when you get more lip than love. Remember that they will grow up!