Making Valentine's

I saw this great craft on a craft blog that a friend of mine linked to off of her blog back at the first of February. http://www.notimeforflashcards.com/2009/01/lovely-butterflies.html

My friend Becca had already mentioned to me that she was planning a Valentine's Party for the kids so I decided that the boys and I would make these as Valentine's for all our friends. The first step is to use water colors to paint on heart shaped white doilies. (We used the four inch heart since we were going to be gluing these on cards.) This was our first experience with water colors and it was lots of fun. The doilies turned out beautiful.I told the boys to remember to put their brush in the water, then the paint, and then color with it. Here is Nathan reiterating.

I made up four of the card fronts to see how well things were going to turn out. On the blog I got this idea from she showed a bottle of white glue in her supplies so I used white glue to stick the doilies down. It turned out terrible. The white glue, since it was wet, made the colors run and fade where the glue was. Yuck - at least I didn't make them all up! Here's a shot of the ruined doilies and my two sons making their sad faces which I think are actually pretty comical.

Ain't that pitiful?

Benjamin just looks concerned and maybe a little mad - who knows?It was all okay in the end because both boys were excited about getting to paint on some more doilies. (Nathan is wearing his Valentine crown he made in his class at MOPS earlier in the week.)

On my second attempt at putting the card front together I got smart and used a glue stick. It worked like a charm. Then the boys helped me use the glue stick to add the red body (which I cut out of some left over scrapbook paper) and pink "To:" hearts (more scrapbook paper). We did use the white glue for the googly eyes and heart mouth (which was mad with a heart punch from my scrapbooking supplies). I just drew on the antenna since we were kind of cramped for space on the card. Also I used white paper for the card background the second time around and liked that look much better. Here's our whole collection of Valentine's.

I also made these VeggieTale themed ones for each of our friends. I figured since everyone would be giving two Valentine's to our household they should receive two from us as well. This was the front of the second card.

Here's the inside. (I'm getting as much mileage out of these Bob and Larry costumes as I can! Nathan actually protested saying I couldn't use this pic for our Valentine's cards because it was from Halloween. He's a bit of a purist. I assured him it would be okay to use it - especially after I added some hearts.)
And just for laughs I added this bit on the back of the card.

Next we needed to make a box or bag where we could collect our Valentine's from our friends. I decided to go with the gift bag idea since that would be easier to store for later. I've discovered that Valentine's is a very pro-girl holiday. It was just about impossible to find any boy friendly Valentine gift bags or even stickers. We ended up buying two red gift bags, a package of foam letter stickers, and a package of dinosaur stickers (I went to Dollar Tree so it was all quite affordable.). We used the letters to put their names on the bags. I then drew a big heart under their names and told them we were playing a new game for Valentine's called "Fill In The Heart." They used the dinosaur stickers to cover up the line I drew and then fill in the heart as much as they wanted to.

Here is our finished product (Benjamin was very serious about filling in the entire heart - he asked me to help him cover it completely) along side some other Valentine goodies we received and the crowns they made in their MOPS classes.