DIY Grandparents' Day Gift {Personalized Oven Mitts}

Do you know what is not easy? Getting a toddler to hold still long enough to put paint on their hands and then take that painted hand to press on an oven mitt. It’s just not easy! Don’t get me wrong he loved the part of smearing his hand in the paint, but then he wanted to play with it and not cooperate. I’m pretty sure I got more paint on me then on the oven mitt or even the plate filled with paint.

We wanted to create a sweet Mother’s Day gift for my Mom and my Mother-in-law this year. We were getting ready to leave on our Florida vacation the next day so I wanted something that we could easily create and something that would be easily packed in our already filled car.

I had been scouring Pinterest for a few ideas and I just love the ones using our little guys hand and feet prints, but I have to admit it was so much easier to get a perfect stamp of his hand or foot when he was just a newborn. Now at a year old, it’s like wrestling a really strong monkey who makes noises at you and somehow overpowers you.

To find these oven mitts I went to the local Big Lots to see what they had. I had planned to go to Wal-Mart, but Big Lots is so close to our house and I like keeping things simple! I paid $6.00 for each set, so it was a little over $12.00 with tax. Next, I dug in my craft bin (which is actually a old tool box) for some green paint and some fabric paint to finish them up.

These DIY oven mitts were so simple and so easy (minus the toddler making messes). I made them for Mother’s Day, but you could even make them for Grandparents’ Day or even as a sweet Christmas gift. I just love making homemade gifts – nothing says I love you like taking some time out of your busy schedule to make something. Now don’t get me wrong, I am not super crafty and I am not a perfectionist, which means a lot of my gifts don’t turn out the cutest. Once our little guy is a bit older I can pawn off the workmanship on him so there will be a good reason as to why the paint is smeared or the something is misspelled.

Here’s some of my other easy and budget friendly DIY projects:

DIY Sharpie Mugs

DIY Front Door Vine Wreath

DIY Ribbon Wreath

DIY Christmas Photo Ornaments

DIY Father’s Day Gift with Handprints

DIY Mother’s Day or Birthday Gift with Pictures and Handprints

Funny story – this past Christmas I made a super sweet wall hanging for my Mother In Law. I took our little guy’s footprints around this nice poem I had typed. I then framed everything together in this beautiful frame. After we gave the gift, they were passing it around reading the poem and looking at it. Someone in the family noticed the poem was about Grandchild’s Hand and the hope for the future…. But I had stamped our son’s FOOTPRINTS on the paper. What?!?! I don’t even know what I was thinking!

I remember trying to get his handprint while J held him and he just kept fighting me. Each attempt was worse than the one before. The print was smeared or I didn’t get a whole print. So after what felt like a thousand attempts, I just did his feet. But it never occurred to me I needed to change the poem! UGH!

Oh well. Now I just had to change the poem (which I still haven’t done yet) and the gift will be just fine.