Animals,  Christmas,  Crafts,  Painting

Being a Secretive Santa

The week before Christmas we were asked by our neighbors to check on Jacob and Frank three different days. You know, to let them out to go potty and even try and get Jacob to burn off some energy.  These are the same dogs we dog sit for now and again. We love any chance we get to see them. Jim calls Jacob my boyfriend cause I think I’m in love. That is especially funny since I am afraid of 99% of dogs. We have another neighbor that I wish I could visit but Jim visits alone because you guessed it…they have a dog.

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Frank and Jacob

After our first visit we hatched a plan involving paint and dog paws. Here is how it went down.

At home we gathered all of our supplies: black paint, small craft paint brush, paper towel, clean rag, and card stock paper.

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Prepping the card stock paper

The next day when we went over to check on them, we brought our supplies and got to work. First up was little Frank. Now you must remember Frank is 15 years old. He pretty much will let you do anything to him. Recently he had one of his eyes removed so we are always very careful not to startle him. We applied paint to one of his paws and pressed it onto the card stock. We brought along three pieces of card stock so we could pick the best print.

We didn’t get any pictures of this process because we were both busy painting, pressing, cleaning, cleaning, cleaning. Now you must remember we were in someone else’s house. We weren’t nervous of printing Franks paws because we knew he wouldn’t move. Jacob on the other hand, well…we were afraid he would make a run for it with paint on his paw.  It was my job to hang on to his collar and give him head rubs. Hard job. He was also content to sit still. Miracles of miracles.

This is the mess we had going on at their house.

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Time to clean up!

We made sure to clean everything up before we left, after all this was supposed to be a surprise. Once we got home we trimmed the card stock to fit the frame and Jim added a thin piece of luan plywood to the back. We also wrote Frank and Jacobs names on just above their paw prints.

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Finishing touches

Here it our dog paw print complete.

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Cool or what?

We wrapped it in Christmas paper and on the tag we wrote: To Mom and Dad…From Jacob and Frank. On the third visit, we brought along the gift and tucked it under their tree in the back hoping they wouldn’t discover it until Christmas day.

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Surprise!

They came for a visit on Christmas eve and guess what? They had discovered the present and just had to open it since neither one of them put it there. They guessed it was from us.

If we were to try something like this again there are a few things we would do differently. First, we would have watered down the paint slightly and second, we would have used the small craft brush to just paint the pads of the paws. It would have been easier to clean up too.

Later

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