crayon valentine's cards

We received a note in the pre-K folder last week that said we could start sending valentines on Monday, and that there needed to be either one for everyone or none. Which makes sense. Nothing stings more than being Pig Pen with one valentine, or worse, Charlie Brown with none. This being my first year as a mother of a child in school, I was scrambling. Do I make? Do I buy? What the hell?

I checked out Pinterest and saw a lot of tutorials for homemade valentines. I preferred doing that, but also didn't want it to be insanely hard. Beezus and I looked through a lot of ideas together. She did wonder why so many people post pictures of boys on Pinterest. Yuck. Boys.

We do like to riff on other people's ideas and create our own thing. So, go ahead. Open up your Valentine!

Shoot, kraft paper came with the sticker. Sorry about that.

Yes, that is a circle crayon. (I couldn't find heart-shaped silicone pans. DAG! I am too impatient to wait for Amazon on this one.)

ANYWAY, this valentine was so super easy to make, and really a lot of fun to do with Beezus. This morning, we made swirly circular crayons. The tutorial for that is right here. Those take half an hour at the most. And that time is mostly removing paper from crayons.

Basically, you need the crayons you are attaching. And this:

I found those felt heart stickers at Michaels in the sales section for 15% off, or something. I thought it would be a good sealer for our valentine. So, I cut cardstock Kraft paper into 4" x 6" rectangles. I created a very simple document that read "color the world with love. happy valentine's day. love," and printed it on construction paper. I used red, but I think it would have looked great with black ink. I liked the organic and faded feel of the construction paper. It looked earthier, if that is possible, than the bright cardstock I had. I did have to trim the construction paper before loading my printer. I printed four copies for each sheet. I then cut them to 3" x 5". We then glued the paper to the kraft paper with glue stick. Now, we just dotted each corner, which was important for attaching the crayon.  Then, we attached a foam sticker to attach the crayon. The crayon bottom was a little concave, so that is why only gluing the four corners was helpful. We could press the paper up into the crayon. Then pretty much we were done. Bea signed her name on each of them. I did half and Beezus did the other half. So this is definitely a craft that you can prep and then have kiddos help. I cut everything while Beezus was at school, and we put them together when she got home. As you can see, she inherited my sense of balance.

 We created a lot of different color combinations. Purple/pink/peach, orange/red/yellow, green/blue/teal, magenta/purple/pink. And in the same way, we used different color construction paper and matched them up with the crayons as best we could.

I thought I would do a close up of the different color combinations.

Then we sealed them up with a kiss and sent them to school.