if you are a parent with a kid in school, i bet you've had the wonderful experience of spending the night before valentines day pulling your hair out as your child takes 9 hours and forty two minutes trying to choose between transformer cards or go with the retro pack (which you are fond of and trying to sway his decision cause you wanna get the rock outta there already before you curse this love day into non existence)....thunder...thunder...thundercats...ohhhhh!
then, just when you get home you realize, oh geeeziss, i need to have my 2nd grader address these to all of his 52 class mates, friends, teachers, family members...okay...back to calling off the holiday! where's the whiskey?
k...everybody remain calm. sit back, sip your whiskey and remember the cutest moments when you were little, walking around the classroom, dropping little treasured envelopes into cute valentine receptacles. trying to play it cool when you drop THE valentine into you know who's big heart. aww. adorbz!
few hints: stay in that cute moment. be patient with your lil one. they can mispell things and not start a card over. but most of all....forget the store bought cards!!! oh my stars...come on...they just get tossed, hopefully recycled, candy pillaged and probz not even read. get creative...make something the other kidlets can keep and don't get swag candy to add the the hoards of sugar they will ingest that day!
here's what we did this week. you'll need:
- some sort of air dry clay. i used a paper based clay and liked it a lot. any craft store will carry it.
- a rolling pin
- some sort of letter stamps. i just got some leather stamps, but you can get little alphabet rubber stamps from michaels for $1.50! the dollar store might even carry them.
- i found little screw eyes at the hardware store, but anywhere that sells jewelry stuff will have something similar. this is for the pendants.
- if you wish to make magnets out of the hearts instead...easier...then grab some little magnets at the craft store...i got mine at the dollar store.
- paint. i used acrylic, but man...spray paint would have been a lot less time consuming. more expensive, but you'll only use a bit and have the rest for other projects in the future.
- wax or parchment paper
- heart shaped cookie cutter
start by placing a sheet of parchment paper on your work surface. roll out a handful of clay with your rolling pin. cut out heart shapes. you can keep re-rolling out the scraps of clay to get all the hearts you can out of that chunk of clay. you wont need much.
using your finger, smooth over the edges. now, stamp out cute conversation heart sayings on them or if you have a list of the names of the kids in their class, you can personalize them. if you want to make necklaces, you will carefully screw in the screw eyes into the tops of the hearts. if you are making magnets, you will glue them on the back after you are done painting them.
they'll need at least a whole day to dry out. when they are dry, paint them. ours needed a couple coats. i did the first coat and then Loji, my little guy, helped me with the rest. he helped with stamping too.
i picked him up from school the other day with some markers, card stock i picked up from the print shop and cut into small cards there on their nifty paper cutter, and took him to the coffee shop to draw little cards for his friends. we had so much fun! he loves to draw though...if your little one doesn't care to...you don't need to...you're done. they'll just bring the little treasures to school and pass them out.
here's some pics to show you what we did....have fun!