Craft fail: A for appearance, F for clean up

I saw this adorable tutorial online for how to make these "cupcake" ornaments, and I thought to myself, "I could totally do that!" and "this would totally be great to do with the kids!". So I promptly conned my friend Terra into doing it with me and the kids. I am sure that right now she is thinking of me as she picks concrete off the pads of her fingers. Don't you love gifts that keep on giving? If you have the same desire to make these, I have one question: "How attached are you to the skin on your fingers, or your kid's fingers?"

The project seemed easy enough as outlined on the website. You spray expandable foam into cupcake liners, cover with glitter, put a bell on top and wahlaa! Cute cupcake ornament. Riiiiigghhhtttt. The crazy tutorial lady left a few things out.

Problem number one, I had never worked with this foam before. Someone should have mentioned gloves. In its liquid state, it resembles liquid marshmallows, once its dries its much more like concrete mixed with super glue. It. will. not. come. off. As I type this, four hours later, I still can't completely bend my index finger. The only chemical that even touches it is pure acetone. Public service announcement: once the foam has taken off your skin, the acetone is really going to burn. Gloves would totally have solved this problem.


Someone also should mention that when you squirt the foam into your cupcake liner, it will not look all puffy and wonderful. As a matter of fact, its going to look like an albino cat used your carefully chosen cupcake liner for a litter box. If you don't know this in advance you will try to "fix" it (and so will your darling children), only exacerbating problem 1.

Poor Chloe, my sensory sensitive child just could not stand to have it on her fingers. We did the best we could to clean it up, but ack!!!! We are going to be picking this stuff off our fingers forever.

Now, just so you know.. the end result is super cute, and the glitter is very fun. Hindsight being 20/20, I am glad to have the cute craft to hang on the tree. However, we will never, ever, do this craft again. But, if I ever run into someone in the witness protection program who needs to get new fingerprints... well, I may have just the craft for them.