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 :)

A Work in Progress

I've been wracking my brain trying to come up with a fun way to share about recycling on my packages when I mail them so that when they reach their destination the person receiving them knows that they can reuse or upcycle the shipping envelope again so that it doesn't just get tossed into the trash.

It just happens that my son has this great little garbage truck that we picked up at the thrift shop and it's actually a green recycling truck with recycling symbols all over it and it hit me that I could make some sort of rubber stamp with the same sort of sign and then add on my 'reduce' and 'reuse' tag that I love to add into my item listings :) So I fiddled around with the arrows and lettering for a while until I got it just right and then added in a cutsie little heart into the center *grin*.

I've got it all ready to go on my tracing paper, reversed image and all, and tomorrow I'm going to transfer it onto a Speedy Cut rubber pad and carve it out. I can't wait to see how it turns out. I've never done lettering before so I'm not sure how tricky it will be but I'll share how it turns out :)

~ Rosina