Celebrating 100

Days of Kindergarten for Andie!! YAY!!  Between her enrolling in her Iowa school 3 weeks early and then being homeschooled for the month of November while we were transitioning to our new place I don't know exactly how many days she has gone to kindergarten but we are celebrating the big 100 today at school!!

So a week ago Andie brought a sheet home stating what she had to do and what she also could do (if she wanted) to get ready for the celebration.  She HAD to bring 100 items (we chose paperclips - easy) and she COULD design a shirt.  She really, really, really wanted to have a shirt with 100 items on it. 

Now for a non-crafty mom like myself...this spells disaster.  In fact I am documenting all of my pinterest "fails" at the moment just to show the world how non-crafty a person can be.  This is just not my area.  I am great in other realms.  Science.....I can do science.  I can tell you what animals made what tracks or what their poop looks like or I can balance chemical equations all day with a huge smile on my face.  But when it comes to crafts.......not so much.  I lack the patience, the creativity, the vision, you get the picture.

Enter Craig's parents.  They are great with ideas and helped me come up with the "vision" for Andie's shirt.  A shirt with 100 beads that spells her name.  That is awesome.  And I can sew a little bit so I decided to sew the beads on.  Yes.  Every. Single. Bead. 

And it wasn't that bad.  Actually I think it turned out great.  Andie loves it and because I sewed each bead I think the shirt will last through at least a few wears.  We will see today when we pick her up from school. 

So here is one for the books.  A craft project that turned out for this science nerd....

First we chose a shirt and I had Andie pick out 100 beads.  If I wanted this to look really nice I suppose I would have picked out a pattern or type of bead, etc. But this was the fun part for her.  So she picked out the beads and then we layed out the beads to form her name.  I then wrote her name on her shirt with a sharpie by just eyeballing about how big the letters were going to be.  I figured I could squeeze in beads or spread them out as needed toward the end.

Here is me sewing the beads on.  I did not sew and tie each one.  But I did thread each one through a loop and then thread it through the shirt.  I tied at the end of each letter.  (Or like in the case of the I...at the end of each line).  I tried to short cut by lining up 5 or 6 beads and trying to make one line out of them but that did not work so I went to looping each bead through individually.    So here you can see a small green bead being looped into the shirt.

The finished product.  She is soooo happy.  And the shirt did not take me too long.  I think it too about 10 minutes to pick out the beads, write the name, etc and maybe an hour of sewing.

                                                                      A close-up

 

And a picture of Caleb as I was taking the pictures.  Whenever he sees a camera he starts saying "cheese" so I had to take a cute snapshot of him as well!!

Well Andie was HAPPY HAPPY HAPPY with her shirt and it did feel like a big accomplishment to see something turn out close to what I envisioned.