Disneyland Souvineers-Space mountain shirt with the silhouette machine

There aren't too many days left in our countdown calendar for our trip to Disneyland.

I've been busy making some personal touches for our trip.

We have our Minnie Mouse ears ready to be packed

And when I saw this shirt that Jill at Handmade by Jill made for her son, I knew I had to make one for my little guy.

If you ask Owen what ride he's most looking forward to, he will almost always say Space Mountain.

I used my silhouette machine, a retro Disneyland poster image, a grey shirt from the dollar store, and some heat transfer material to make this shirt pretty spectacular.

He was pretty excited about his new shirt.

So, what's your favorite ride?Any tips or tricks for making the most of our trip to Disneyland?

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Disney for two Princesses

My two nieces (nearly 3 and 5) will be taking their first trip to Disneyland in just a few weeks.They are princess obsessed much to the chagrin of their father.
As they prepare to head to the Magic Kingdom, I put together a little care package for them.Both little girls got their very own princess dolls to join them on their trip.No trip to Disney is complete without Minnie Mouse ears.
I followed the tutorial by The Suburban Mom here and used the template for the ears from Disneyfamily.com.

I downloaded the Waltograph font to my Silhouette when I made the Disney countdown calendar.
I used the same font to cut out vinyl for the personalized Disneyland water bottles.

No trip to Disney is complete without an autograph book.

Their mom was a bit hesitant about having an autograph book (it is one more thing to carry around), but I remember when my daughter was that age, it gave her an ice breaker when she met the princesses, and to a little girl, spending time with the real life princesses is the best part of Disneyland!

I made these autograph books very compact so they don't take up much space.

They were super easy to make.

I bought small pre-made journals from JoAnn's and then 

I cut out the front cover letters on my silhouette machine.  Then I used two packages of princess stickers to decorate the front cover and each of the inside pages.

I added their names because when kids are shy and approach someone new, they usually mumble their name.  It's usually the highlight of a little girls trip when one of the Disney princesses calls them by name.

I added a glow stick wand to the mix (from The Dollar Store of course!), and packaged them all together for a fun little Disneyland treat.

What have you done to make your trip to Disneyland special?

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Countdown to Disneyland using the Silhouette machine

Our family has a bucket list of places we want to visit (again or for the first time)

before my oldest son heads off to college.

When you parent young kids you think they will never leave,

then the reality sets in and we realized we only have four more years with all three kids in the house.

So with that in mind, we are setting out to cross off the second item on the family bucket list

(the first was a trip to Washington DC)

#2: Visit Disneyland (again...)

Yep, all of the kids have been before.

 May 2004

May 2004

December 2005

December 2005

December 2005

In fact, our oldest two kids have been several times

But my youngest son was just three months old when we went last time.

He was snuggled up in the sling the whole time

The "baby" is now 6 and he's requesting a countdown calendar until we go.

So I busted out my trusty silhouette machine and set to work.

This project wasn't as cut and dry as I would have hoped.

I had to figure out (again) how to do the print and cut feature

I imported the Disneyland font to my silhouette program

and also had to import Mickey Mouse ears since Silhouette doesn't sell Disney items (yet)

I followed this tutorial on how to make a tear off calendar.

It gave me a good idea of how to do it, but because I have updated (or outdated...not sure) software, I had to search for the answers on how to do things a little differently than what Jin showed.

Then, mid project, my new printer ran out of ink. 

I ordered ink on-line and had to wait a week for it to arrive.

But once that was up and running, I got started.

Notice the registration marks on the printed sheet?

Those help the Silhouette know where your page is so it can cut in the right spot.

Everytime I loaded the pages in to the Silhouette, I made sure I used the "detect registration marks" feature.

The one time I didn't it cut crazy and I had to reprint the whole thing and start again.

Each page also has a perforated edge so that they tear off easily.

Once the pages were printed and cut

I used my silhouette machine to cut out Disney font numbers and glued each number on to each page

That took FOREVER.

In hindsight, I should have used some print feature to do this

Once I had all of the page numbers glued on

I stacked them up in descending order

Then I found some rubber cement at Michaels and put a thick layer on the top off all of the pages.

As the rubber cement dried

I clipped the top together with a large binder clip

I used about 5 layers of rubber cement to bind the pages together

This is the finished countdown with the cover on.

It looks a little rough (well loved???) because it's been used for the past few weeks.

The back cover on the inside says

We're going to Disneyland

that way when you get to day 1, you pull that off and see the message!

Each night my little guy crawls into bed and takes out his countdown calendar

He tears off the page and is excited to see how many days are left!

After he's done, he can sit the calender down on his dresser and wait for the next morning.

What special ways to do you use to countdown the days to a big day?

I would love to hear them.

PS-Just a reminder that there is only 1 more day to vote for Holy Craft to be in the top 25 creative mom blogs.  It only takes a second to vote and you don't have to sign up for anything.If you like what you see here, please take a second to vote for me.

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