Valentine Handprint Cards & One For You

Valentine's day is just around the corner and every year we make something special to give to Omi and Opa. Last year we made valentine paper bag books and this year I thought it would fun to get really messy and make handprint heart cards :)

No kid can resist having their hands completely coated in paint!



The trick is to get them to keep their hands on the paper and not their faces, walls, chairs, oh and hair... hair is a really good one to keep sticky paint covered hands out of *grin*. Why is it that as soon as they know that they aren't supposed to scratch a body part it becomes mysteriously itchy??

With our watercolor paper folded in half and each hand thoroughly covered in red paint we then placed them onto the paper doing our best to keep our thumbs slightly bent and our pointer fingers touching to make a lovely handprint heart :) To be fair we did a couple of practice runs on scrap paper before doing our 'good' cards so that we could perfect our heart making technique :)

One tip before getting your little one to stick their hands to the paper is to make sure that you have your card upside down or the opposite way that you would want it to stand when it is complete. That way your heart will display right side up. We made that mistake the first time and when we stood the card upright to dry we realized that the heart was actually upside down *grin*. Still cute but my little guy was not happy his heart didn't look quite right!

To give each of our cards a little shimmer we sprinkled glitter over the wet paint and then using our alphabet stamps my daughter stamped 'Be Mine' and 'I ♥ U' in the center of the handprint hearts for sweet little Valentine messages :)

I just love how cute they look all lined up on the table drying :)

We got a little carried away with making handprints and ended up with more cards than we actually need so if you or your children would like a little surprise Valentine card sent to you in the mail just let me now in the comments below :)

The first five commenters will have one personally sent to you by my little heart handprint creators *grin*.

All of the Valentine cards have now been spoken for :)

Hugs,
Rosina

PS. Looking for more crafty ideas or inspiration? Pop over to Natural Suburbia's Creative Friday and see what others are up to :)