Handprint Art

For the past two years, we've given homemade calendars with handprint and footprint art of the kids as gifts to the grandparents. If anyone out there is looking for a fun, cheap, and relatively easy kid-made gift, I'd highly endorse this one.

I got the idea from my Aunt Lana, who gives a similar gift to her daycare parents and then just browsed Google Images for ideas. By decorating the front with markers, we didn't have to wait for it to dry to do the page on the opposite side.

The penguins are one of my favorite.

February is handprint grass and fingerprint flowers. The handprint hearts that we tried for valentines didn't work out very well.

 March is a rather thick-necked giraffe. There were lots of ideas for animals like this - lions, elephants, dinosaurs, etc.

The robins for May might actually be my favorite.

June. We are big Dr. Seuss fans around here. And the kids certainly are wild.

Handprint fish for July. When I did the marker embellishments last year, I accidentally did my mom's so that the fish were upside down.

August is a footprint rocketship. Amelie really liked having her foot painted.

The hungry, hungry caterpillar seemed fitting for September. Amelie's hand is the head and antenae and James's handprints made the body and legs. Their feet are pretty obviously different, but it's harder to tell with the hands.

November has got to be the classic turkey.

December is a footprint Rudolph. Amelie did a thumbprint to make his red nose, too.

One change I made this year was to include the next January at the end. Mostly because it's hard to make appointments around the end of the year without a place to write them down, but also because there were so many ideas for art for the season. These are thumbprint lights. 

I got the whole thing spiral-bound at Kinko's for less than $5 in about 10 minutes (parking and lugging two kids around downtown is a slightly different story).