Valentine's Cards for Home and School!

I make a lot of my own cards and I always like to try different things. Here I made one for my sweetie and my son that uses some unusual elements.

Also, below, I have a cute one that is both a card and a gift to do in your classroom or at home with your kids. It's a great way to use up your patterned paper scraps. If you're like me; you have a lot of them around! The kids really love all the colors and patterns and often, I am tired of them. (I always want NEW papers with all the exciting new patterns and colors that I haven't tried yet!) I'll get to that in a minute, let me show you the first card up close.

On the top photo, I simply made dots of glue and added micro glass beads. I never used those before and I really wanted to see how they looked. I plan to stick them on glue dots next time I use them. On the bottom photo, I wanted to show you the unusual element in red. Can you guess what it is? It's actually a piece from and onion bag. I like how funky, cool it looks. What do you think?

The hearts were punch from cardstock then stamped. After that I inked the edges and covered the entire thing with dimensional glaze. Before it dried, I sprinkled a little glitter on them.

Ok, so here is the kid's card. What I like about it is that is relatively easy to do and if you have younger ones, you can cut the hearts and even make the card base for them. They could always put stickers and whatever else you like on them.

You need:

glue stick
tape
construction paper
glitter or other embellishments
markers
scraps of patterned paper, cardstock, or more construction paper

Just take a piece of construction paper and cut it lengthwise (below), then fold each piece in half. Tape the two together to make an accordian card. Cut out 5 hearts. What I do is make a template out of cereal box cardboard; then I employ willing students to trace that and make a few more. We share them and I don't have 15 students overwhelmed with the idea of trying to cut a heart freehand! They can trace the heart onto the papers they want. Glue the front heart down completely(above).



For the inside 'pages', have students only glue on the "V" part of the heart so that the top stays open. They can now insert little notes into them. They could write 'coupons' or reasons they love their parents or other family members. It's fun to cut them with decorative scissors too! You could even tuck a photo in one heart. And don't forget to have them decorate the front! If you use glitter, try having them do that over some type of tub or box lid so that they don't waste so much of it and your carpet isn't permanently glittered! But, maybe that wouldn't be so bad...Hee hee.