Valentine Matchbox

Bigfoot needs to bring to school 22 Valentine cards during the week of February 8th. We decided instead of giving out cards you can buy, we would make them ourselves. The teacher sent home a note about a week ago to have the kids start signing their cards over a bunch of days so that it would not be such a big task for 4/5 year old. Here is a pile of the project we did.

Using the paper we had on hand I printed, cut out and glued 24 boxes [cannot forget the teachers]. I used bright pink for the bottom and then coordinated the outside box with decorative paper we had on hand. Since Bigfoot is still young and her attention span is not that long, I did the boxes on my own. I decided that as long as the paper coordinated we could dress it up with hearts.

I wanted to try out polymer clay as I have seen some cool looking buttons on blogs that I follow, so we rolled out the clay and used a heart shape cutter on both the red and blue clay. We mixed in a bit of white clay to give some of them a marble look. I used a glossy glaze on one side of the heart to see how it would change the look; I like it glossy. The kids can re-use the clay hearts and make a necklace for their mom or grandma if they want ~ recycle.

I printed out on pink paper hearts for her to sign her name so we could attach them to the box. I kept telling her over the last 4 days that she needed to sign the hearts. I am trying to get her to write smaller and keep her "long 8 letter name" all on one line. Yesterday she took the pages and I thought maybe she would only get about 5 of them signed, she wrote her name on all 30 hearts and then cut them out without me knowing. Truth be told, I was happy that she cut out all the hearts and even though they do not look perfect I still think they look fabulous. She saved me a ton of time. We used hemp and attached all the hearts together and then hemp again to wrap the hearts around the box.

As for the candy wrap, I used Hershey Nuggets and then printed out the sayings we wanted to use on to labels, and then used a background I designed in MS Word and ran the sheet back through the color printer. Bigfoot then put the labels around the candy for the inside of the box. After all her hard work, she was able to have a few Nuggets herself [I found out she had 4!].

Here she is wrapping the candy.

Here she is showing the 6 wrapped candy she has done. 18 more to go!

Not your usual Valentine Day card, but we do like to be different. We had fun doing this project and we are done, yeah! Now she needs to decide if she wants to make some Valentine Day cards for her gym friends and if so we will make it a much simpler project.

Have a great day and thank you for visiting my blog.