Animal Hand Print and Family Tree

I wanted to show you the Mother's Day gifts that I ended up doing for my mom and mother-in-law.  I found both of the ideas on pinterest and was super excited to do them both!

First for my mom.  When my parents found out we were having a baby, they changed their workout room into a nursery for the grand kids.  They did a jungle theme.  My dad is really good at copying designs and repainting them, so he painted a huge monkey, giraffe, and elephant on the walls from the fabric my mom chose.  They had mentioned something about putting their grand kids' hand prints on the walls so I decided to start it for them!  The only animal sound my daughter can make is an elephant noise so I made her hand print into an elephant for them to hang on the wall.  

 First I mixed some gray paint.

Then I painted it onto my daughter's hand.

 Here is the Bammer's original hand print.

 We had to do it twice because the first one didn't come out quite as well.  But that's expected with a toddler. 

And here's the final result!  I love it and I think my mom did too.

For my mother-in-law, her posterity is growing quickly!  There are 3 grand babies being born within 4 months. So I decided to do a Mother's Day tree with the names of all her children, their spouses, and grandchildren.  I left some extra leaves to add the new names as they come, but I have a feeling we'll quickly run out of room.  Maybe by then I'll just need to make her a new one.  ;-)

 I found a tree and little birds on google images and printed them on colored paper.  I then painted the tree brown so it stood out a little more.  Then I printed all the names and "We Love You Mom" on pink paper and cut them out as leaves and glued them all on.  After I did this, I realized that the frame was 8 x 10, but my paper was 8.5 x 11!  So the outer leaves were being covered.  So I pulled up the edges and had the leaves overlap the matting.  I love how it turned out too!

- Alexis