Our Valentines

I’ll be so sad when the hooligans are too old for school Valentine’s Day parties. Being crafty little kids, they really like deciding what Valentine they’d like to make for their classmates each year…and I love “helping” them!

In a stroke of pure genius, Jill over at Create.Craft.Love hosted a Valentine’s exchange for those of us who miss those school Valentines.  We all agreed to mail a Valentine to each person who signed up…it ended up being 45.  Here’s the Valentine I sent:

I got to use my Big Shot, a chalkboard stamping technique, and red glimmer paper…woo-hoo!  One of those snowy days last week provided me with the perfect excuse to stay home and make Valentines all day, then I popped them in the mail Monday after we got the address list from Jill.

One of the perks of moving as often as we do is that we can make the same Valentines each year if we’d like.  Princess Thundercloud has been in a different school for the last three years, so she’s chosen these Valentines each year. And, by the way, I know I should be sending non-candy treats, but since we made jack o’lanterns from clementines for Halloween, I felt candy was okay.

I’m sure you’ve seen these…they’re so easy to make.  Just take a photo of your sweetie, focusing in on the outstretched hand.  Print them in a wallet size (4 for 39 cents at Costco), then use a craft knife to make a slit at the top and bottom of the hand.  Slide a lollipop in, and place the whole thing in a small ziploc Valentine bag (from Dollar Tree) to keep it neat.

When you have a kid named Finn, it’s punny to make these Valentines.  I’ve seen other variations using Swedish fish or goldfish crackers, with sayings like “Glad we’re in the same school.” But we go with “You’re fin-tastic.” I’m sure he’s going to outgrow these someday, but not yet!  In preschool we made similar ones with goldfish crackers and in kindergarten we made fish-shaped crayons. I printed the cards on the computer, then he just had to add the “to” and “from.”

I found these iPod Valentines last year and made them for my niece and nephews, as well as my kids. You can download and print them from Living Locurto. They look very realistic when wrapped around a box of conversation hearts. They suck up the ink, though, when you print the entire thing, so this year we modified them. By the way, Dollar Tree had the right size conversation heart boxes 4 for $1.

Over his Army career, the hubs has become quite the Power Point ranger. He somehow copied just the front piece into Paint, then made a page with 6 fronts on it, which used much less ink for 24 of them!  Then we cut black cardstock (I bought the inexpensive, less thick kind from the craft store) into 3-3/4” x 9” pieces to wrap around the sides and backs of the conversation heart boxes. To make them easy to wrap, I scored them at 1/4”, 1”, 3-1/2”, 4-1/4”, 4-3/4”, 5-1/2”, 8”, and 8-3/4”.  Then cut them at 4-1/2” and you’ll have two wraps. We used double-stick tape to stick everything together. We used 4 pieces of 12×12 paper to make the wrap part.

And, look…here they are, last Saturday, pouring their little hearts into Valentine production in the sweatshop known as the kitchen table.

Yes, that’s my GI Joe guarding the guillotine paper slicer…it was the closest thing to a power tool for him to use. It was a fun way to spend Saturday morning, no matter what you hear.