A Mind Blowing Valentine

My girls have always made their own Valentines for school.  I think it's because they saw all of Mommy's goodies and wanted to play along.  I would even attempt to sway them to use store bought cards (Aren't the My Little Pony cards cute?!).  They would look at all of the designs and characters, then say "I still want to make my own."  Then we would go to the craft area and buy glitter glue, heart stickers, doilies, lace, and any other goodies that they thought they might need.  After a few years, I gave up on doing the easy thing and just checked their art supplies to see what they might need.

As they got older, their cards became more creative and less 'glitter bomb'.  My oldest, even though she's almost a teenager, still makes a few Valentines for her best buds.  My youngest is still making them for the entire class.  Needless to say, we look for designs that are fun and appealing, yet very simple to make.  This year we found some great inspiration from pinterest.  There was a card that said "You Rock!" and when opened, revealed a packet of pop rocks.  We looked for the little packets of pop rocks at the store, but didn't have any luck.  We did, however, find mini Blow Pops...  We used MDS to create a tag for the front of her card.  I don't use my MDS often (I love to get inky!), but this was SO EASY!!!  Camille picked a pattern from ice cream parlor DSP for the background and then added the heart and oval scallop punches for her sentiment shapes.  We printed the tag onto regular printer paper, then she cut out all 35 squares and glued them to her white card stock.  Since there wasn't any stamping, we used an inexpensive white card stock for the base.  Besides, most of these will have the candy ripped off and then be tossed aside.

The candy packet is attached to the cardstock with a little piece of sticky strip.  I didn't take a picture of the back, but we used the to/from stamp from Winter Post.

This is the first year we have finished this early.  When the last one was completed, Camille looked at me completely serious and said "That was fun! Can we start making next year's?"  yikes...