Guest Blog Post: Mothers Day DIY Gift

Meet my creative, pretty, talented friend, Kellyn Maurer.

Earlier today she informed me on what she will be giving her mom for Mother's Day and I asked her if she would share her idea with you all! Miss Maurer, who is 16 years old, and enjoys allot of the things I do-- sports, crafts, blogs, writing, photography and drawing closer to our Lord. Thoughtfully, Kellyn offered to share her artistic talents with you so you can present your lovely mother with a homemade gift too! "It’s that time of year everyone! The time of year when we all take a step back and finally notice (and hopefully let them know) how amazing our mothers really are. Think about it. I’ll try not to go off on a long speech, but speaking from experience, Mother’s Day has meant more to me as I’ve gotten older (and hopefully more mature).  Although I’m still in high school, my mom has been my best encourager, favorite shopping buddy, talented chef, taxi driver (until I got my license), teacher, and more! This Mother’s Day, my mom specifically asked that we not spend a lot on her.  So of course, I turned to Pinterest for help! However, Pinterest can be pretty intimidating sometimes.  I really just wanted to make her something simple and inexpensive. Finally, I found this idea, was perfect because I already had all of the supplies (except for the chocolate), and my mom definitely loves DOVE dark chocolate. It was a win-win gift idea.  

    To give credit to the original creator, here’s the blog post I used for my DIY gift.

    But if you want to see my own version of this year’s Mother’s Day DIY gift….just keep reading.

    To begin, make sure you have all of the supplies:

• 1 pint-sized jar w/ lid (or bigger if you want more chocolate, but this size fits perfectly a bag of DOVE chocolates)
• 1 bag of DOVE chocolates (I got the Dark Chocolate Almond, but there’s also milk, sea salt caramel, caramel, mint, or regular dark chocolate.)
• Any kind of decorative ribbon, string, or twine
• A pencil to trace with
• (Optional) markers, calligraphy pens to decorate with
• Scissors
• [not pictured] Glue (I used ELMER’S Glue-All Multi-Purpose Glue, but craft glue will do)
• (Optional) [not pictured] Modge-Podge
• These printables

Let’s start with the printable.  You can use either one, but I just chose the one that said “Happy Mother’s Day.” (Makes sense, right?) The other one says, “You Make Life Sweeter.”  Now, my printer does not print with colored ink, so I had to be creative.  I got out my calligraphy pens and just added some color to the faint black-and-white ink. I think it turned out pretty good…don’t you? ;)

And since the nicely-colorful circle around the printable was not visible with my black-and-white ink, I drew my own circle.  I just took the outside part of the lid for the jar (since it was hollow and I could see where to center it), and traced around it.

This circle was a little too big to glue onto the actual lid, so I placed the flat lid over my already-traced circle, and traced another smaller circle. [You can skip the first step if you can eyeball how to center the flat lid, but I thought the hollow lid would be nice to start with.] After tracing the second circle, the next logical step was to cut it out! So I whipped out my “kid” scissors to cut out my decoration. Now, I had to find some way to attach the printable to the lid.  I used Elmer’s glue with a few small dots, and it seemed to work just fine, and only wrinkled a little bit! ;)

After placing the lid on my jar, I thought it needed a little more of a polished look, so I experimented with a little mod podge.  If you don’t have any mod podge on hand—don’t panic.  Here are two recipes for making homemade mod podge.  One used just glue and water, and the other has some other ‘fancy’ ingredients.

[glue & water]

[some other ingredients besides glue and water]

I’m still not sure if I like the way it turned out, maybe because it was on top of regular printer paper with some pretty ‘fresh’ ink/marker on it.  Oh well, Mother’s Day isn’t about perfection, anyway, right?  We don’t have this holiday because all mothers are perfect.  Instead, we celebrate our mothers because they’ve done a spectacular job, even though they are imperfect humans whose job is to raise imperfect humans to be the best they can be.  So, now that we’re past the far-from-perfect mod podge job, let’s fill our mason jars with that delicious, smooth, yummy, DOVE chocolate (or something else if you’re mom is one of those people who is allergic to chocolate or something—can you IMAGINE?!).  Is anyone else getting hungry for CHOCOLATE right now? It’s ok, you can admit to it. I know you just had to save one of those chocolates for yourself. After all, you’re the one who worked hard (for..hm…maybe 20 min.?)  to make this for your mom to make up for all her years of hard work. ;) Just kidding, I won’t tell anyone if you eat a chocolate, since I did the same thing.

Now that your jar is filled, and (hopefully) your lid is dry, go ahead and assemble the lid.  Then you tie your ribbon/twine/string around the top of the jar for the finishing touches! Because I love taking pictures and also because it was the warmest day of this year yet (74 degrees!), I snapped couple of pictures of the finished project outside on my deck.

There you go! A quick, simple, and inexpensive Mother’s Day gift. You’re welcome. 

Also, just to let you know that this was not my entire gift to my mom this year, here’s a picture of my gift:

Besides doing DIY projects, I’m also really into photography. One day, my parents agreed to ‘model’ for me, so that I could practice my photographing skillz, and the pictures actually turned out pretty good! So for Mother’s Day, I ordered an 8 x 10 photo and bought a frame to put it in. Although I made the mistake of ordering a ‘glossy’ photo (that’s why there’s such a clear reflection of my arm! lol), I will have a ‘matte’ photo ready to give to my mom by Sunday. It’s still a cheaper gift, but photos are also a more personal, special gift.  

    Alrighty, if you happened to read this entire post, thanks for sticking with me, and I hope you find this DIY gift idea useful this (or maybe next) Mother’s Day!  Also, here’s a shout-out to Olivia Coon for letting me take up all this space on her blog!  She also has some pretty awesome DIY ideas on her blog, so if you haven’t seen them already…you should go check them out!" Thank you Kellyn for all the time and effort you put into this DIY post! :) If you would like to connect with Kellyn she has Pinterest, Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook (but who doesn't these days?!). ;) Thanks for reading and have a wonderful Mothers Day!