Ah Pinterest! I get so many brilliant ideas from you! I’ve been seeing handprint art pieces everywhere and have been wanting to find a way to incorporate something similar into our living room decor, but couldn’t find anything that was big enough or that matched the burlap theme that I’ve been trying to incorporate…until this weekend.
My local Hobby Lobby was having a sale on art supplies so I ran over to pick up some things for the kids and there it was: a beautiful burlap canvas, with white gesso paint in all it’s glory– and I was armed with my trusty 40% off coupon! I did a little happy dance, grabbed some black acrylic paint on the way out and headed home to paint my family’s hands.
This was the result: 
Do you know how hard it is to get a 17 month-old’s handprint??? It took her father holding her horizontally with one arm and her print arm with his other arm while I tried to keep her little fingers from fidgeting all over the place… while she was growing increasingly anxious over her mommy and daddy twisting her every which way to get the job done…yeah, SOOO… that littlest handprint on the bottom there of our Lil Miss really was the very best we could do, ha ha.
It was really fun for all of our boys though, and as I painted their hands I thought about how special their handprint on our family was, that God chose them to be in our family and that it would not be our family without them. One of our boys chose to use the opposite hand that everyone else was using, because he likes to do things differently than everyone else- we all laughed and talked about how that was definitely characteristic of him and how it is what makes him a great leader at times. As each handprint was made, comparisons were made of how big their hand was next to daddy’s, or how much bigger it was than mom’s or another brother’s, or how similar our hand shapes were, length of fingers, etc…… everyone walked away feeling individual, yet similar as family. It’s amazing how something so simple can fill your heart with so much God-pride– He did this. He made this amazing group of people and called it FAMILY. Love.
My goal this year is to fill our rooms full of “meaning” in terms of decorating. I don’t want just a ‘look’. I want our family to be nurtured by our environment and to have fond memories of their home in the future. I firmly believe that if you take care as a homemaker, even the way your rooms are decorated can minister to your family, it’s definitely not something you can just throw together in a couple hours, as I am finding out! I’m currently focusing on our master bedroom the most, but if I find a project that will fit elsewhere, I take little breaks to work on other rooms.
What are some of the ways you minister to your family through decorating?
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