All My Crazy Projects: January 2013

I never posted the Valentine's gifts I made last year so in case you are looking for ideas here is what we did:
I made some salt dough (play dough) for my first grade class that I go into. I dyed it red and I rolled it out. Using a cookie cutter I cut it into heart shapes. I put one heart into a snack size baggie (there was room that I could have put two in each bag) and stapled a Valentine's Topper over the zipper of the bag:

Actually, I cut out a topper out of cardstock, folded it over the bag, stapled. Then printed off the saying onto regular paper and used a tape runner to place it over the cardstock. That way you don't see any staples.

My youngest gave out hugs and kisses:

First I took some Valentine kisses and wrapped them in red saran wrap and tied it with valentine ribbon (don't cut the ribbon yet):

Slide on the tag:

And tie it around a Hug barrel drink (I bought them at Walmart):

Slide in the straw, trim your ribbon and you have a gift of Hugs and Kisses!

If you have the mini zip top bags that you can find in the craft store you can use those. You can use those two ways: 1- fill with hugs and kisses OR 2- fill with kisses and attach to a hugs barrel drink (like above). These are cute, but I didn't have enough left for the whole class. I made these the same way as the dough.

Last year owls were all the range and I incorporated them into my son's Valentine's. His class didn't really do an exchange, but we made some anyway. I had come across a great deal on scented pencils (a bucket of them) over the summer and bought them. My kids loved them so I knew the 5th graders would too. I used my cricut to cut out owl shapes (you could use clip art). I had two ideas:

We ended up using the first one (click on the pictures to enlarge). I cut out the owls and then printed the saying on labels and stuck them on the back. We taped on the pencil towards the bottom - we wanted it to be like a branch. The second idea was shaped more like a traditional valentine with the saying at the top and a branch at the bottom. I cut slits into the paper to slide the pencil in on the branch. Here is a close up of the saying - he didn't want it lovey dovey, he is a 10 year old boy (you could use valentine instead of friend, but he chose friend):