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Tattoo Valentines

And here are the ones we made with my seven-year-old. She drew the designs for these tattoos and we printed them on tattoo paper.

I ordered this Silhouette tattoo paper after reading the reviews on amazon, but you don’t need to have any special cutter to use this paper. Just an inkjet printer. I scanned my daughter’s drawings, reversed them (important!) and printed them on the paper. Then you have to wait for it to dry (which took almost an hour) and then ever so carefully apply the adhesive paper on top, and finally rub any air bubbles out. I was nervous since I only ordered two sheets, but it turned out fine and we were able to get 40 tattoos on two sheets.

So I took her drawings and added some typed text as I wasn’t sure how legible her writing would be on a small tattoo. Then of course she wanted to attach candy to the cards, and knowing how much parents love their kids to eat a teaspoon of colored sugar, I acquiesced and bought Pixy Stix, cut some slits in the card and my daughter attached one to each card. The heart paper clips came from Paper Source and were a bit of a splurge for me. As you can see below, the quality of the tattoo is just OK, but about what you normally see with temporary tattoos.

If you’d like the printable for this one, you can download the .pdf file here.

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Valentine Crackers

Today was Valentine Central at our house and the dining room table is now covered in bits of paper, ribbon, tissue paper and candy wrappers!

My nine-year-old and I got the idea a while back to make Valentine crackers (like Christmas crackers), and I found this tutorial over on Not Martha. Megan has also made them for Valentine’s Day now, so you can read her great tutorial for those as well. I could only find the poppers on ebay, but you may be able to find some in one of the shops that Megan recommends. They took a while to get here since they came from overseas, but they were inexpensive and since we used gift wrap tubes (which were sturdier and looked better than the toilet paper tubes that we thought of using), the project itself was reasonable.

For my daughter’s crackers, she chose to fill them with candy, cut out hearts, ribbon confetti and stickers. I cut the gift wrap tubes into 2 1/2″ segments using a craft knife and we used tissue paper for the wrapping, so it was easy for my daughter to roll them up on her own. And the twist ties that Megan used are genius and so much easier for little hands. I had these silver ones on hand, but looks like you can find some red and white striped ties here. Once I got out the supplies and made a sample to see how to put it all together, my daughter was able to make them on her own.

We’ll see how the popping crackers go over with the teachers! I am planning to give them some warning. Here’s a printable for the labels we used if you want to try these out in the future. This makes 1 1/2″ x 7″ labels, which work with gift wrap tubes, but if you are using toilet paper rolls, they will need to be a bit longer.

 

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Heart Bracelet

Since Valentine’s Day seems to be our next crafty holiday, I thought I’d share a photo of this heart bracelet I designed for the book Stash Happy Felt. (Shown here before I added the elastic strap). This was another project using the wonderful industrial wool felt from FilzFelt. For complete instructions and templates, you can check out the book, which has 30 quick and easy felt projects. In the book, there are two different templates — a larger size for adults and a smaller one for kids, as shown here.

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Valentine’s Round-Up

Here are a few Valentine’s card ideas from the past. My kids have ideas for this year, so hopefully I will get to share those with you soon. Meanwhile, we are collecting toilet paper tubes! My husband asked why they were all lined up in the kitchen and I said we were saving them for Valentines. His comment was “Of course. Nothing says ‘I love you’ like toilet paper tubes”. So true.

Tweet, Tweet printable valentines.

Cupid’s Arrow Pencils with printable from my post for Alpha Mom.

Crayon Hearts with printable card.

Several ideas for simple handmade valentines in a post for Alpha Mom.

Recycled card ideas.

Salt Dough Hearts.

 

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Handmade Paper Valentines

My eight-year-old made paper on a Brownie field trip last weekend, so she wanted to do it again for her Valentine cards. We’ve made paper before, but with a slightly different method. This time we poured the pulp mixture into a heart-shaped cookie cutter for the mold. She is planning to draw faces on these. My eight-year-old did almost this entire process herself, but I did operate the blender.

Below are the supplies we used, but you may be able to find things that work just as well around your house. For the paper mixture, we used recycled office paper, toilet paper tubes, a few sheets of pink paper and some red acrylic paint added for color when needed. Recycled paper is best of course, but if you have too much writing on it, the mix will turn gray. You also can not use shiny paper (magazines, food packaging, etc.).

  • recycled paper
  • blender
  • water
  • heart-shaped cookie cutter
  • small bowl (just larger than cookie cutter)
  • screens (2 cut larger than your cookie cutter)
  • plastic screen (We used plastic canvas, but you could use a sturdy wire mesh.)
  • wooden block for pressing out water
  • felt, quilt batting or paper towels for drying

1. Rip the paper into small pieces and blend it with water. Add paint if needed.

2.  Have a bowl set up with the heavy plastic mesh on top and one screen on top of that. Place the cookie cutter in the center. Pour the paper mixture into the cookie cutter.

3. Spread it around with your fingers or the back of a spoon.

4. Allow the water to drip in the bowl while you count to 20.

5. Carefully pull off the mold.

6. Place another screen on top and gently press out more water.

7. Place a wooden block on top and press again.

8. Remove the screen and turn the heart onto the felt to dry. Blot again with the felt (if very wet, you can again apply pressure with the wooden block).

9. Allow to dry at least 24 hours before decorating.

Happy Valentine’s Day!