XOXO Valentines

Wanted to post this year's Valentine project before St. Patrick's day rolls around too...

L's latest thing is tic tac toe. And the song X's and O's. So there you have it. Ready made for a take on the tic tac toe Valentines idea.

I took advantage of my paints from my daily drawing challenge to brush out red and orange X's and O's and a red color wash for the game board background. A couple of dotted pen strokes and embellishments for the lettering and separator lines and I had my base for the card. I then scanned and assembled the design in Photoshop. Placed them four up on a page and printed them out double sided.

All that was left was to assemble the bags and sort out Hersey's Kisses and Hugs for the game pieces. That was L's job, which he loved.

A-mazing Valentines

 

 

In honor of Valentine's day, I'm digging back to last year's cards to kick things off. L was heavily into mazes. He plowed through every book we gave him and then he asked me to make new ones by hand. Usually while we are out to eat. So when I saw this idea floating around the internet, I knew we found our project.

I created a heart shape in Illustrator and then repeated the shape inside it to build the maze channels. I placed it four up on a letter sized page each with a different path. To do so, I began cutting out openings and creating blocks with additional lines unique to each of the four.

I selected different shades of red, pink and orange paper to form the backdrop of the cards and to cut down on ink. Once all the cards were cut to quarter of a page, two slits were made with an X-acto to hold the pencils to the cards. I found some cool two-sided pencils at a local art shop, which I thought made it even more fun. 

These were fairly quick to make. The most time consuming part was creating the artwork for the cards at only about 1.5hr. Then copying and cutting only took another 1hr with the little guy's help. He was so excited to craft his Valentine's cards.

Valentine's past

 

So...I've been a bit absent lately. I had hoped to kick off the new year with great gusto on the blog but here it is almost the end of February and here I am. I thought I'd catch up with some of my recent craft/design projects that have been keeping me busy and happy in my free time.

First off, Valentine's Day! You've got to love all the great ideas being pinned lately. My little guy has been running around retelling the "Orange you glad I didn't say banana again" knock knock joke for months. So this idea seemed to fit just great.  He also woke up one Saturday morning saying he wanted to make hearts for the treat bags. About 100+ hearts later we were good to go. That coupled with orange slices and a custom label and we had our valentine's set.

Valentine's...Pinterest style

I have definitely caught the Pinterest bug. I've been saving tons of kid's Valentines ideas over the last few weeks, determined to get designy crafty. I was pretty good at getting supplies but yet again was working the night before to assemble my four year old's cards. He was actually a big help but it wasn't til this morning that I realized I needed double to cover his entire class. The Star War's version was a last minute add-on to get us to the right amount. Luckily I had a tube of those glow bracelets from Target to get me by.

So here's my take on some ideas floating around the 'boards' these days.