valentines for littles.

Hello everyone!

Growing up, I'm pretty sure we handmade a lot of our valentines, though at some point, we graduated to the "fancy" store-bought kind. Funny how that was cooler. With the advent of Pinterest, there's been a resurgence of one-upping, over=doing it crafty kid DIYs for the holidays.

I'm no crafter, truly, but my sweet boy really digs doing projects. I imagine that when you have a boy, these days will be short-lived, and he will soon roll his eyes and run off to play Transformers.  So we scrolled through Pinterest a bit for inspiration one rainy/sleety day, and found some really cute ideas and a million free printables from very talented and generous people. I think it's kind of awesome that there are people willing to offer up their designs to us lesser talents in the name of fun projects for kids.

I was working through a nasty virus and couldn't deal with heading to Michael's/Target/whathaveyou, so I popped onto Amazon to see if I could muster up some cute items and make use of my Prime membership (best investment ever btw, esp if you have a Roku).

I found some adorable retro-y swirl lollipops, cherry Jelly Bellies (hm, wherever shall the extras go?), some red and white bakers twine, cello bags, and foam paper.

And completely stealing from this sweet idea from Blonde-Designs, we cut out some lips and mustaches from red and black foam paper, popped them onto the lollipos, and stuck them in the cello bags with some Jelly Bellies. Printed out a ready-made tag (here from The Tom Kat Studio (made for Parenting magazine) and had the little guy sign them (painstakingly), and stapled it to the cello bag. I was going to use the twine to tie it on, but I ran out of time and my son loves the stapler. So I'll find some other use for that cute twine.

Done and so cute!

What did you do for Valentine's Day as a child? If you have children, are you helping them craft up cards this year, or going straight to the Star Wars/Barbie aisle (which I have done every year and will after this year too, ha)?

Have a sweet day!