Crafty! Making Valentines

Greetings from Snowville USA! Yes, we are buried under snow here at our house and the natives are getting restless. And Mommy is getting restless from having all the natives here at the house all.the.time. But! Mommy has decided to embrace life and take it all in stride. After all, it is kind of nice not to have to be anywhere or do anything. Except, you know, the laundry, cooking, cleaning, etc.

So back before the snow started in waves (and just for the record, since this is my only journal - the kids have been off school since Friday 2/5 and now will not go back until after President's Day on Tuesday, 2/16; their last full day of school was Tuesday, 2/2) I had the kids start making Valentines for their classmates. We've finished them in anticipation of their class parties which were supposed to be this Friday, but now? Who knows. Happy post-Presidents day? Anyway - here goes.

Target had all this cute Valentine scrapbooking stuff in their $1 section; I picked up little Valentine papers, a package of stencils, gel pens, and stickers; the glitter and ribbon were from Joann Fabrics, also $1 or less each; we made almost 40 Valentines and had lots of ribbon and glitter glue left over, and I used a little more than one package of the paper from Target.

I used my cookie cutters to trace large hearts onto white card stock and smaller hearts onto the scrapbook papers (this paper was really thin, which is why I opted to use the cardstock). The kids used my 'fancy' scissors to cut them out. Sarah and Jason had lots of fun trying out the different patterns they made :)

Evie and William chose to use the heart stencil to draw in the lines and then fill in whatever they wanted to write. I cannot get over how neat Evie's printing is - mine NEVER looked that nice! They wrote the recipient's name on the back.

Next I had them choose a colorful heart for each one & then I hole-punched them and tied a short piece of ribbon through each one. Then they added the glitter!


These came together pretty quickly; Evie could have done all the cutting herself but she gets lazy (my hand hurts!) and William is very painstaking and careful and he takes forever, so I did most of the cutting myself. It was a fun project for us to do together, and I'm pretty pleased with the way they turned out. The cost of the supplies was probably about the same as buying a box of Valentines (excluding the 2nd hole punch I had to buy because William inexplicably broke the first one) and hopefully a lot more memorable than just writing names and sticking heart stickers on cartoon characters. Now hopefully Evie and William will get to go to school at some point and actually pass them out :)

Tomorrow I am going to press my luck and try to make cut-out sugar cookies with them. Again. My Christmas attempt did not go so well, and I swore I was never doing rolled cookies again, but I have one last trick up my sleeve that I'm going to try. Hopefully this will be the charm and there will be a lot less swearing this time around. Hopefully. Sarah is developing a very colorful vocabulary :)