One cool thing about taking a hiatus from working full-time in corporateland is having a little more time to work on some arts & crafts projects with my first-grader. We always made homemade Valentines in the past, but we were in less of a time crunch this year. Since the wee girl is getting older, she’s much more interested in helping out with the designs of our projects, too, so that added an extra layer of fun this year.
I picked up some 4″ x 6″ pastel card stock & some adorable papers by Doodlebug Design at the art supply store, as well as some Valentine’s stickers — hearts, owls & forest animals — for our little animal lover. I also pulled out our containers of stamps so she could pick a few to use.
The card design our 7-year-old came up with was fairly straight-forward — she wanted strips of the patterned paper to act as a branch going across the bottom section of the solid card stock. We adhered those strips to the paper using double-sided craft tape.
I helped her cut wavy edges – she can do it herself now that she’s older but it takes her awhile and since we were making 30 cards or so, I pitched in.
After that, she started applying the various animal stickers & added some stamps (mostly butterflies, moons & cats) and used a “Friend” stamp on all of them. For the cards that she felt needed an extra-special touch, she drew some stars and hearts.
I also showed her a stamping technique where we used markers to color the stamps instead of the stamping ink pads — this way she was able to make a multi-colored stamp or “fade” as she called it. She liked using this method on the “Friend” stamp.
Best part of this project was how proud she was of the cards she made. This was a great winter-weekend project that even some of the youngest school-age kids can tackle.
