DIY Craft Project: Yes! You CAN make your own Valentines!

Okay, I get it. There are some people in the world who just aren't crafty (or THINK they aren't crafty). So they go to the store and buy character Valentines and send them to school with their kids. No problem! Not everyone has extra time to spend traipsing around buying craft supplies for Valentines. Some people would rather pull their hair out than supervise their children making handmade Valentines. I don't blame you sometimes! BUT. I am here to tell you, you really CAN make handmade Valentines! With minimal supplies too! And minimal cost! And if you have grade school age children, minimal help! Now, how does that sound?? Are you sold yet? Well, let me know show you what we did this year for our Valentines!

First of all, Pinterest is your friend! You can find a million EASY Valentines on Pinterest and most of them are just free printables, add the "treasure" (either candy or a pencil or whatever) and you're done! But I have crafty kids who wanted to take matters into their own hands! So off they went to search on the iPad.

My 10 year old Minion-obsessed fourth grader found these!

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Isn't that cute! But, of course, she didn't want to just print these out. She wanted to draw it herself! So she drew her picture, we shrunk them down and printed four to a page. You can do this with ANY DRAWING! Even a toddler/preschooler can make a Valentine picture and you can turn it into a Valentine, just like that!

 Here's how she finished them:

All you need is your small printed drawings, some paper cut slightly bigger than the drawings (we used scrapbook paper, but you can use construction paper or anything really!), glue dots (or a glue stick, school glue, etc), and a paper cutter or scissors.

My daughter just put a glue dot in each corner of the drawing page.

She taped a pencil to the back (bought at the dollar area at Target for 50 or 75% off in the off season--8 pencils in a pack) and wrote her greeting.

Done and Done. Now, that was wasn't too hard, was it?? ;-) I hear all the time from people when they see some of our projects that they just aren't crafty and could never do what we do. Honestly, sometimes it's not difficult at all to do something handmade! And it always has such a great WOW factor when you give someone something you made yourself, versus something store-bought.

Okay, this next project maybe is for the bit more advanced crafter. But I have to brag. Ella made this ALL BY HERSELF! It's her valentine box to house her valentines at school. She saw something like it on Pinterest and created her own version. Isn't this the most adorable thing ever!!

I love all the details she put into it! The buttons glued on. The teeth taped in the mouth. The pipe cleaner hair. The three-dimensional quality of this is AMAZING! The only thing she had help with was cutting out the mouth because we had to use an Exacto knife.

Now, onto my 8 year old! She also created her own Valentines this year. She came up with this all on her own! I think she was inspired by this pin:

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But really her end product was all her own!

She used Fabri-tac to glue two foam hearts together (you can get these at Michael's or Target). Then she stuck the Smarties on with glue-dots.

Finished it off by making little heads out of puff balls, googly eyes, and pipe cleaners. She attached the puff ball to the tip of the Smarties with Fabri-tac--trying not to get the glue near the candy. ;-)

She wrote her greeting on the back. Pretty awesome that she did this without any supervision at all!

And finally, my son's preschool class is exchanging Valentines. I wanted to do something I could make quickly without a lot of effort. He isn't into crafting (yet) so I made these on my own. But you certainly could have your kids help you! I did find this on Pinterest here.

 All you need is some paper, bouncy balls, and favor bags.

 Cut out a heart shape, write, "You're out of this world" on it. I wrote my son's name on the back.

Because the bouncy balls are rubber, it is kind of difficult to actually attach them to the paper. So I put them in favor bags and it worked great. So easy! This took me maybe 30-45 minutes total to do.

Making your own Valentines definitely doesn't have to difficult! You just have to find an idea and run with it. Many of them aren't even time-consuming! Give it a try!