Happy Mother's Day!

Happy Mother's Day to all you mom's out there! And an especially Happy Mother's Day to our mom back home. This is (sadly) her first mother's day without any of her kids around in 32 years.
Here's what we made for her special day. There are a handful of pictures of this project. It was our first attempt at an explosion box (but now not our last! Think of the possibilities...) I think for our first attempt it came out pretty well. We felt like this was a good project for her. It's not a card, so she can leave it out for as long as she wants (even though it does say "Happy Mother's Day", you can't tell if it's closed.) And we added a little something in it, so she can treat herself to something nice!
If you've never seen a box like this, it looks like an ordinary box. The top here is probably my favorite part of the project.

...and then (in this case,) you tug on the ribbon and take the top off...and:

It opens up to reveal the inside! This box has  2 1/2 layers on the inside. The pictures only show the "crafty" areas. The layer on the bottom is here we each wrote our own little note to mom. No one needs to read that...;) The other two blocks were cut with Celebrate with Flourish)
The bear was probably the hardest part of it. We weren't sure that he would stand up on his own, but he showed us wrong. He's made from only ovals and circles- who knew?? (George & Basic Shapes) He could use some work, though. He's not nearly chubby enough. Luckily, you can't tell from the front!

We were going to go with the traditional flower route, but decided that with our past experiences with flower deliveries, that wasn't such a good idea. (one time they only gave us half of the flowers we were supposed to get, and the other time, the vase was broken in a hundred pieces when it got to the door.) So we made our own flowers for her! Since our best medium is paper, we made her some paper flowers on top of the box! Now her flowers won't die like they usually do. These are handmade flowers, with inked edges. The two light pink flowers actually started yellow, but e inked them and they look amazing (if I might say!!) And, as if she didn't know it was for her, there's a tag with Mom's name on it, in the shape of a heart, what else?!

That's all for today's project. I did enter it into some blog "challenges", because I'm just really proud of it!!

Cooking with the Cricut- Mother's Day Gift Ideas

Fantabulous Cricut - Mother's Day

Stuck on You Sketches - In Celebration of Mothers