Giant lolly pop valentines

So, first of all, for all the Americans reading, we British call "lolly pops" what you guys call "suckers", and for all the Brits reading, in the US St Valentine's day is waaaayheyheyyyy more commercialised than back home. All the kids trade valentines treats at school, which really is kinda cute and I have to admit that I do like that it is just about love in general and not exclusively love of the romantic variety. For anyone reading in a place other than the US or UK, how does your valentines day work? and what do you call lolly pops? By the way, we also call "popsicles", "ice lollies", which for some reason makes my American friends laugh and laugh like they have been huffing gas?!



Anyway, with all that cultural intrigue behind us, I just wanted to share with you the valentines cards that we sorted out this year and last year for the kids to give to their friends. A couple of years back I saw a post on 24-7-365 showing the way they had very cleverly made some personal valentines cards of their girls holding out lolly pops. You can see them here. (warning: cute overload) I really wanted to do something like this in 2010, but this exact idea wasn't quite going to work for us for a couple of reasons.

Firstly, I wanted the girls to be able to give cards from the both of them, rather than make separate cards, and secondly I wanted to make the venture a bit cheaper to pull off, because we'd be printing them at home. The solution came in the form of a piece of white PVC plumbing pipe that we had lurking out the garage (these lengths of white plastic plumbing pipes along with their different connectors make very cool, very cheap building materials for kids to explore with, especially if you give them some bedsheets to throw over the constructions to make dens, but that's another post for another day). I just snapped a photo of the two girls holding the pipe together and then removed the background using Photoshop. If I hadn't had the ability to knock out the background with software then I would have just printed out the image at full size, cut it out with scissors and scanned it back into the computer with a white sheet of paper as the background then resized the image to fit on the postcard. The reason I removed the background on these images was to save on printer ink when printing so many copies on our home printer.

I also printed the cards on 4inch by 6inch plain index cards from Office Max, rather than using photo paper, which saved a bit too. As with the original idea, we just cut the holes and slotted in a lolly pop and it looked like the girls were holding a giant sucker, which they thought was total aceness of course.

This is the version from last year...

and this is the version from this year...


I also did one with just my older daughter for her to give to her classmates on Monday, leaving space for her to write in each classmate's name...


The text on these was from the handwriting font that my older daughter made when she was four. You can see how we did that here. I should really make an updated version!

I love how you can see the radical differences in my kid's personalities from these pictures. From the clothes they chose to wear, to the poses they struck. My older daughter is such a gorgeous little tomboy and my younger daughter is clearly dead set on being Cyndi Lauper when she grows up ;) We already knew that though. You just have to look at what they chose for Halloween costumes last year!


Just in case you have time today or tomorrow to make some valentinezy type stuff, here are a few links to older valentine's posts from Filth Wizardry that might be helpful...

• Toilet roll tube heart necklaces.


• Mini roses from dollar store crepe paper.


• Valentine's butterflies.


• Cardboard valentines heart crowns.


• Printable easy to colour valentine's cards for little kids.

Big love to you! and not just on Hallmark day either ;)