Changing it up this year! We decided to flex our DIY muscles, bust out the glue stick and create some super cute, crazy easy upcycled Valentine’s Day cards.
We know it’s easy to run to Target, grab a box of cartoon character Valentine’s cards, scribble a name and call it a day. I’ve done it many times before. However today, as I was making my mental to-do list for the week, I remembered that I needed Valentine’s Day cards for the my daughter to pass out at school on Thursday.
I was immediately annoyed.
First of all, the school doesn’t allow food as treats so the good ‘ole standby of taping 2 Hershey’s Kisses to a card was out (tragically). Second, small toys and things seem to be the norm but that really doesn’t jive with my environmental and sustainable living goals for the year. All the plastic and crap that I will inevitably throw away will then sit in a landfill and take eons to decompose…just doesn’t say “Happy Valentine’s” to me.
But I digress.
As if on cue, a friend of mine posted on Facebook about the incredibly cute cards she and her son had made out of magazines, cereal boxes, old art projects and stuff she had gathered from around the house. I was SOLD.
A DIY project to be proud of! And a major shout out to Katy and Ike for inspiring a truly wonderful project!
Grab Your Materials!
To get started, I trolled the house and started gathering; some old scrapbooking pages, a free promo calendar with lovely outdoor scenes, some stickers, a magazine from our local zoo and a pair of crafting scissors that cut a pretty scalloped edge.
I loved this because it was a project my 5 year old could easily be a part of. She chose her favorite pictures and images and traced hearts all over the place! It was interesting to see what parts of each image she chose…there is a bear heart floating around in the pile 🙂
We cut the hearts out while eating pasta and watching Odd Squad; a pretty perfect evening if you ask me. Then we cut the scrapbook pages into 4 x 7 cards, glued a heart to each card, scalloped the edges with the fancy scissors and she PROUDLY wrote her name on every one 🙂
(Sidenote: We named her Mackenzie. Which has 9 letters. That’s a lot for any 5 year old and in spite of that egregious parenting oops, she has persisted. So when I say “proudly”? I mean P.R.O.U.D.L.Y)
She is so so excited to pass these out and has requested that we add Valentine’s Day stickers as a small gift. Considering the rest of her cards are 100% recycled materials, we can do stickers.
I totally loved creating these and showing my daughter that not all great things come from Target. Taking a minute to look around and see what you can create from what you already have, that’s a heck of good thing.