Ballards Handprint Knock-Off

When I saw this picture on the Ballard’s Design website, I had this conversation with myself:
Why would anyone ever pay $89 a piece for those? I could make them for free. But why would I want to? …Actually, I bet those gloves would make a cute handprint keepsake.

Guess what? I was right. (It happens occasionally.) I can make those for free & it did turn out to be a cute keepsake.

I didn’t want to use just any old newspaper, I wanted it to have some sort of meaning (plus we didn’t have any newspaper, anyway) so I Googled former First Lady Abigail Adams, the namesake for my Abby, and printed off a few paragraphs in a very small print.

I brewed some tea and just dabbed the tea bag onto the paper to get the color I wanted. Then I scrunched up the wet paper & unscrunched it very carefully. When I was happy with the scrunchiness I let it dry for a while. Abby, who is not quite two yet, actually helped with this part, so it’s a really easy activity to do with kids.

Here’s a before & after:

Then I came back with a Sharpie & traced a cut-out of my daughter’s hand. (I made a cut out ahead of time in case she wriggled around and made it hard for me not to mess up on the tea stained paper.) I added a few other details with the Sharpie too.

I just used a glue stick to stick them to a piece of white paper & stuck them in a frame we already had. I think they would make really cute, easy, (and cheap) Mother’s day gifts.