Summer Gift for Grandparents

I've seen some really cute hand and footprint art; and so when I was trying to come up with a unique grandparent gift lately I started poking around the internet for some ideas along that line.  I found a fun blog called Hand and and Footprint art where I saw the author had made some cards with footprint flip flops.

Since my summer-loving mother in law was about to have a birthday, a hand-decorated beach tote seemed like just the thing.  I'm sure some of you crafty sorts could do a better job executing this concept, (I'm more of an impatient, imprecise idea person) but even doing it simply like I did turned out cute. 

The girls enjoyed having their footprints made (giggled like crazy because the paintbrush tickled ).

The canvas tote, fabric paint, and coordinating ribbon to line the bag with all came from Michaels.  For the pattern of the flip flops I traced around a pair of M's shoes and a pair of G's shoes, but when I filled in the pattern with paint, I enlarged them slightly (because footprints are slightly larger than feet).

I had the girls sit down and placed the bag on the ground for the print.  After each print, I washed the foot and filled in some of the spotty places on the footprint with a paintbrush.

Getting the straps on the flip flops to lay right turned out to be a little tricky.  I'm not going to include a tutorial on that because I think there's probably a better way than how I did it.  :-)