this year's valentine crafts!

We finished our Valentine's projects a week early this year, amazingly.  This is T's collection box to take to school.  It was mainly inspired by this project that I saw on The Crafty Crow.  We used a tissue box.  Instead of covering it with yarn, which I thought looked too time consuming, I opted to cover it with hundreds of paper circles.  Much more efficient!  Honestly, though, it didn't take that long.  I was kind of rolling my eyes at myself when I started, like, really?  This is how you want to spend your whole Sunday, Laura?  But it was kind of relaxing, mindlessly gluing them all on.  I didn't do any kind of pattern or neat rows, just kept it totally random, so that it would look like my kindergartener had possibly helped me with it.  He didn't.  He started out helping, and was doing a great job, but we soon figured out that a glue stick wasn't going to make the circles stick.  So I switched to the hot glue gun and T couldn't help anymore.   He did cheer me on.  I was surprised to look up after an hour of hot gluing and realize all four sides were well covered.  Not bad!  The rock eyes were painted by me, as directed by T.  I used pipecleaners to make the arms/hands and hot glued them on to the sides.  More blue dots to cover the ends of the pipe cleaners and waa-laa.  Finito.  We're crazy about this guy.

 

 

And here are the boys' Valentine's to pass out.  Saw this idea on Pinterest; the link went back to this blog.  I don't think ours turned out quite as well as the inspiration.  I should have cropped them so that the hands were bigger.  Also, the boys were not very cooperative about striking the arm-outstretched-fist-clenched pose.  It is so hard to take good pictures of them.  I totally missed the day of parenting school that covered how to make your kids cooperate for photos.  Mine are generally terrors in this situation.  Getting them to keep their eyes open (not because they're accidentally blinking, but because they are rolling their eyes to the back of their heads.  On purpose) and keep their tongues in their mouths is a serious feat.  Asking them to stretch out a fist like they're holding a sucker?  That is a bridge too far.  So these were the best we got.  T for some reason doing two fists, and S with his fist right under his face instead of off to the side.  Neither one of them stretched out very far.  I spent too much time angling each sucker so that it wasn't in front of their faces.  Then I put a piece of tape on the back of each one to secure the sucker, but I have a feeling that by the time these get to school, the suckers will be all over the place.  Oh well.  The important thing is that they're done, the boys like them, and hey, everyone will get a sucker. 

Valentinetastic.

We don't do homemade valentines every year. It doesn't always come together. This year, for some reason, I was on top of it and got them done early. We found both of these ideas on The Crafty Crow, which is definitely my go-to site for adorable kids' crafts. Love it over there.

For T's Valentines we decided to do these monsters, originally posted at Chef Messy. It took us a couple afternoons, while S was at school. He did a great job tearing shapes, drawing faces, and placing hearts. I think these are so stinking cute!

For his classmates we did a generic, "Happy Valentines Day!" For family members we did a more personal message.

Of course, in a kid's world, no valentine is complete without candy. So we added chocolate hearts on top of the paper hearts, using glue dots. Done.

For S, we used an idea that was originally posted on Design Mom. Mad Lib Valentines!

The original idea didn't include any candy, but we wanted to give a little something, so we bought stick candy at Cracker Barrel and wrapped the Mad Libs around those. So every kid gets one stick of candy, one Mad Lib sheet to fill out, and we wrapped those in decorative paper and embroidery floss.

The blog post at Design Mom included a pdf of tags to cut out and tie to the scroll. S wrote his "to" and "from"'s on the back of the tags.

Here they are all together. I think they look super.

Valentines with boys can be a challenge. They don't want anything to do with the typical Valentine motifs of hearts, flowers, or lacy doilies. So I was happy to find these boy-friendly ideas, and happy to help the boys make these Valentines they'll be proud to hand out to their friends.

valentine's day decoration idea via 2009.

love explosion.
Originally uploaded by Laura Hartrich

I did this little display last year, but I don't think I blogged about it. Today I found the envelope that holds all these doilies and was looking through them with the boys. I'm always amazed at how well they can identify themselves as babies. They never get baby T confused with baby S. I mean, I don't either, but I'm surprised that their young minds are so sensitive to that distinction.

I don't have anywhere to put these up this year. This wall is now my plate wall, and heaven knows I would not disturb that for any holiday display, no matter how cute. I'll hold on to them, though, in case I do think of a good spot.

This was so easy. Basically paper doilies, extra photos I had laying around (from all the times I printed doubles but never gave them away or used them in a baby book), my trusty Fiskers circle cutter, and double stick tape. Simple. Oh, I also put some heart stickers on some doilies, just to bring home the Valentine theme. Don't forget, you can click on the picture to see it larger and also see some detailed shots of the same project in my flickr photostream. The photos on the doilies are mostly of our family, with a few friends thrown in as well. We are lucky to have so, so many sweethearts.