Valentines with Ellie - 2012

One of my favorite developments over the last six months is Ellie's new found interest in doing arts and crafts. Last year at this time arts and crafts mostly consisted of her taking a stack of white paper, scribbling a few lines on one, and moving onto the next piece of paper.

These days she's so much more coordinated. She loves to do projects. She has a great fondness for scissors, but is only using them on paper now and not her hair. She can color in the lines, and draws lots and lots of pictures of our family.

Last year she helped with her school valentines treats. We got the store-bought ones, Dora the Explorer. I labeled them, she added some extra color, and then helped to stuff the bags.

This year, since she is so into all things crafty, I wanted to do something more ambitious.

It involved my trusty Cricut, my new toy (5" creative station courtesy of Beth Kingston/Xyron - thanks Beth!),



and Pinterest. I found this idea on Pinterest and wanted to do something similar.

I pulled out my Art Philosophy cartridge book and flipped through settling on Flower 8, which I thought was perfect since the petals resemble hearts. I cut the flowers at 3" and then a bunch of hearts at 1". I ran the hearts through my new Xyron to create this lovely carpet of heart stickers.



I used Leaf 4 from the AP cartridge, cut at 4 1/2". The sentiment is two stamps from Say it in Style. It's a little bit large, and if it was just for me, I would have cut them a little smaller, but since Ellie was going to be doing all the writing, I thought she could use a little more space.



If you have a gypsy, you can add a little circle in the center of the heart and corner of the leaf for the lollipop stick - it needs to be bigger than the stick so it can make it over the wrapper. I don't have a gypsy yet, so I just used my piercing tool to approximate the center and then pierce a circle around it, it really doesn't have to be exact. (I tried using my hole punch, but it wasn't long enough to get in there....a cropodile would work well too.)





We had a GREAT time making these, and Ellie is SO excited to take them into school next week. I picked up this little metal bucket and a styrofoam ball at Michael's the other day, so this is how she's going to be taking them into school.



This was so easy to do, with just a little bit of prep time. If you have more time or your kids are older, you can always add some additional stamping to the mix, but this was just the right level of effort for us this year.



Supplies Used
Cardstock: Recollections, various colors
Stamps: Say it in Style
Ink: Black
Other: Xyron 5" Creative Station, Cricut Art Philosophy Cartridge, Piercing Tool