::be my valentine::

Lily and I were looking through the magazine Family Fun, which is a great source of fun kids crafts. She wanted to make her valentines for school this year. Her first idea was a 12 inch by 12 inch heart on red glitter paper. At $1.50 a sheet and 23 kids that was not going to happen. After some discussion we came up with a plan.

With coupons from Archiver's the paper for this project was free. You can sign up on their website for coupons that they send out every month or so. Usually they send out one for free card stock with no other purchase necessary. I will walk in with my coupon and walk out with my three free sheets.

We got blue card stock for the boys and pink card stock for the girls. We took my Cricut Cutter and cut hearts out of it. If you didn't have a cutter you could hand cut the cards. That might have been a good cutting exercise for Lulu, but she has got cutting nailed down so I used the Cricut. Plus I love a good excuse to use the Cricut, such a handy thing to have around.

The hearts were about 1.5 inches each. It took two full 12/12 sheets of pink for the girl and one sheet of blue for the boys. We then cut two holes in them at the top and bottom of each heart. With a small sized hole punch this took less than 1 minute, since we could do several at a time. Lily wrote her name on the back of the heart and her friends names on the front. We took our bag of suckers and threaded them thru the paper hearts to make quick easy handmade valentines. She was very excited to get on the bus with them this morning. I am one of the parent volunteers for the party, which is today at 11:30. Can't wait to tear up at the cuteness of a bunch of kindergartners expressing their love to each other. LOVE THIS CRAP!!!

Total cost: $3 for suckers

Total time with a six year old helping:

Cricut cutting and usage - 10 mins

Writing names - 15 mins with several candy breaks

Hole punching and sucker threading - 5 mins

Total time: 30 minutes