Homemade valentine's cards

This is going to seem a little insane to my mates back in the UK that read this blog, because the tradition of children giving valentine's cards and treats to all their friends at school is very much a US thing. Mind you, I've been out here for nearly five years now, so for all I know the tradition may have migrated across the pond by now.

Anyway, it's pretty much expected that kids even as young as preschool age bring a little something in for every classmate, which is a very lovely gesture to encourage kids to be sweet to each other, rather than the usual cries of "I don't want to be your friend anymore. We opted to make some of our own cards this year (last year the kids were a bit to young for this type of thing, so I just cut hearts out of the huge sheets of butcher's block paper that they had painted to use as cards)

I keep a pile of small scratch pads all around the house for sketch work I do, so I grabbed one of these and started folding the pages in half and drawing little cartoon pictures for the kids to colour in. I was expecting this to last for maybe ten minutes max, but the kids got totally sucked into it and so I kept wildly scribbling to keep up with all four of them colouring. In the end we had been doing this for over an hour and each kid had more than enough cards to give to all their classmates. I think we made somewhere between 70 and 80 of them!


I thought it might be a good plan for the future to draw out 8 cards onto one sheet of paper, so they could be printed and cut out for the kids to colour. These ones I did in the same style as the cut out food and robot parts I did last month, so that the little kids can get a tidy job colouring too. Just click on the thumbnail image to view the full resolution pic for printing.

I left the back of the cards white to try and save some printer ink, but still, if you have to do more than a handful then it would be a good idea to print one and photocopy from it rather than use up all your black ink. Ooh, and remember to select "fit to page" for printing too.

This is what they look like all cut out and folded...

I think my favourite is the Cutie Noodle one, because I call my kids that all the time.

I have some other valentine's crafts that I need to post, but I don't know if I'll get them up on here before valentine's day gets here. Too few hours in the day!!! I promise I'll get them up here eventually though. Hopefully in time for next year's valentine's day.

I must say thank you to Mary Anne at Thrifty Craft Mama for awarding me a blog award doodad. It's a butterfly award that you're supposed to give to "the coolest blog I ever know". Let's hope this of foreign origin and isn't a subtle comment on my lack of spelling and grammar.

It came with no instructions for passing it on, but I feel like I should share the love, so I'm sending you to Style Rookie. I hope that my girls have even a quarter of the creativity and self awareness that Tavi has when they get to her age!