Valentine’s Day is a great time for kids to get creative. There are many different ways kids can do this on Valentine’s, and for many different people!

A lot of kids like to make jewelry. Stores sell kits to create bracelets, necklaces and rings. Your kids can visit a craft store and choose their own necklace material and the beads to go on them. In keeping with the theme of the day, they can choose heart-shaped beads in various colors. Create one necklace yourself so that they can see how it is done. Matching bracelets can be made using the same beads.

Kids can give their teachers a bouquet of roses. And I’m not just talking about any old roses! These special roses are made of tissue paper and pipe cleaners. Show kids how to fold the tissue paper and wrap it around the pipe cleaners. The flowers can be presented in a vase or with a ribbon tied around them.

Candy is a super fun craft supply for kids! Instead of beads, use candy to create bracelets for boys and girls in the class. Candy pieces can be strung over a piece of string. I remember loving the candy necklaces we would buy at the store, but, making my own candy jewelry would just make it that much more fun!

Valentine’s Day crafts can be created for family members, too. If grandma is into flowers, kids can give them a flower pot with seeds and a little bag of potting soil. Using paints, kids can decorate the pots in Valentine’s Day fashion.

Instead of buying packs of Valentine’s Day cards, let the kids use a card program and make their own for other members of the family. They can add whatever they want to the card. Some cards come blank for the kids to write what they want or with cute sayings already inside.

Kids can make Valentine’s Day decorations for the house to put everyone in the mood to express their love. Using a piece of string, construction paper, scissors and glue, they can create a banner to be hung in the kitchen or anywhere in the house. Each paper heart can contain one letter in the words “Valentine’s Day”.

Valentine’s Day is fun for kids. They get to have a good time making crafts for others and enjoying gifts given to them.

One gift you can give to your child is a fun Valentine’s Package from Mrs. Lisa (that’s me!) at My Very Own Mail.  You can read all about it here: Awesomely fun and totally wonderful Valentines mail for kids

Sammie has been very busy making lots of things since we moved here to Alabama, and since this one wall in our house is coming down in the renovations, her daddy has let her decorate the tar out of it! It has been so much fun. It will almost (almost) be disappointing when we get our remodel finished and we can’t do fun stuff like this!

It’s been a lot of fun just letting her hang one picture after another up there! And you will see many different holidays represented there, too!

You will find Jesus up there, along with pumpkins and turkeys and even some hearts for Valentine’s day! You will even find a ‘Pin the Hammer on the Daddy’ up there! I’ll have to showcase that in another post - he’s a cutie! She made that for her daddy’s birthday party!

For now, though, I will leave you with a ‘Pin the Patrick to the Art Wall’:

Fourteen year olds! What are ya gonna do? Sometimes they are just plain weird!

I’m afraid if my husband hears me say that one more time, he might just have a heart attack! …or have to be committed or something! Eeks - or have me committed! I just can’t help it, though, folks! I see promise in all kinds of gadgets and gizmos….and yesterday was no different. I was cleaning up my office and I went to throw these two things away:

And I had barely taken two steps when I realized, ‘Hey! We could make something out of these’! Well, luckily for me, my daughter, Sammie, was nearby and she wholeheartedly agreed! So the two of us began trying to come up with the perfect plan for these pieces-of-art-in-waiting. I was just thinking ‘art’, but, you see, this little chicky of mine has a heart of gold! She had the best idea!

She said that we should decorate them really prettily and then make them into little coin collectors. “Yeah, Momma! We could make them Salvation Army coin collectors and collect money for the poor!” Is she good or what?

So do you think that these two little guys…

…made it into the trash?

No way! And that, my dear Cass, is the project that we have in the wings at our house! Now ya’ll head on over to Cass’ place, via one of the ‘Online Craft Club’ graphics - and see what projects everyone else has in the works!

This is one of my favorite crafts that my kids and I have ever made. It all started with this one:

My oldest son, Patrick, was in kindergarten, and I was so proud of his making this! I think, if I remember correctly, that I was proud of his lining up all those strips of paper so straight…who knows, I was a first-time kindergarten mom - you know how we get! Well, I loved it so much that I wanted to get it laminated. Before heading to the teacher’s store, though, the rest of us decided to make one, too. No sense going to laminate just one thing, right?

So here is the one I made for myself:

It is so easy to make these, and there are so many different things that you can do to decorate them! All I did with mine was cut other pieces of construction paper in shapes to be glued onto the back construction paper. You might not be able to see in the picture, but, for some of the pieces - like the letters of my name - I used the fancy scissors that cut shapes, instead of straight edges. I love those darn scissors! I have a set of three of them, and my daughter recently got another one, too. They just add a little bit more flair to your projects. My kids just used them recently for package tags for gift wrapping for all the Christmas gifts and they were really cute!

Ok, back to the topic at hand, here. Let me show you the others we made. This one is the one that Shawn made for my husband, Mark. Shawn was around four years old when we made these. Awww….

Isn’t that cute? I love it! And you can see, really, how much we love these - they’re a mess! We use them all the time - for other craft projects and for eating on them. I would say that we use them mostly for crafts, though, as they are covered in paint and glue.

Here is the one that Shawn made for himself. I helped him a bit with this one:

So if Shawn was four - then Sammie was two years old and here is hers:

I cut out a bunch of pieces for her, and she directed me where to put them on, and then I wrote her name, and she decorated it with markers. Awww….

The cool thing is that these little pieces of history are used all the time! I just love that! So often the history we preserve of our children’s lives is stuck away in a drawer somewhere (or on a hard drive) and hardly ever comes out to be seen and enjoyed. That is so not the case with these!

The other morning, I scrambled some eggs for the kids for breakfast before school. And I used the last of the eggs. As I picked up that empty egg carton - a lovely, Halloween-y idea popped into my head!

So I set the carton aside, instead of throwing it away, and finished getting the kids off to school. Once I finally got rid of the little monsters *snicker, snicker* I set to work on my idea!

It felt so sneaky, and like such a treat, to be at home doing kid’s crafts - alone - with no kids! I got the same feeling Mark and I used to get when the kids were little and they’d leave to the grandparents house - and we’d play with their toys!

Ok, back to the egg carton! I cut it in half and turned it upside down….

Aren’t they cute?? It was so quick and easy and turned out really cute. And I had fun doing it, too! I did let my daughter help with the faces once she got home from school, though.

The egg carton that I used was styrofoam, and that is definitely not the best for having paint ’stay put’ for very long. So it would definitely work better with a cardboard egg carton, but, for such a quick and easy craft, I don’t mind if it doesn’t last very long. And it was a good ‘trial’ version - if we want to try it again for next year.

And I just thought that I was so clever, because, I used the top of the carton for the ‘paint tray’. It definitely came in handy!

Howdy troops! Welcome to my new ‘crafts for kids’ blog! We’re gonna have so much fun - creating, concocting, conjuring, and don’t forget - making a mess! My own kids have forgotten how much fun we used to have cutting, gluing and being creative - they’ve hit that ‘maybe’ age.

‘Maybe I’m still a kid and can have fun.’

‘Maybe I’m a young adult and I need to be mature - act cool - and all that.’

So between their growing ‘old’ and my getting busy working at home, we have lost sight of our collective craftiness. I am hoping that this blog will rekindle our love of all things crafty!

There are so many fun crafts that we used to do together! They used to get so excited when they saw me bringing out the old plastic tablecloth, because, that meant it was time to get busy! I’m going to have to try to find another tablecloth like that. It was the handiest thing! It was an old one of my mother’s and it was a thick plastic with a really soft backing. It was so durable and put up with all kinds of crafty torture! I would just lay it out on the kitchen floor and each of us would pick our spots on it and get to work! I think between moves and a ‘Mr. Clean’ husband, it must’ve been put to rest. Poor tablecloth. We will have to just find a way to get crafty without one - until I find us a new one!

I used to research all kinds of cool stuff to do, and a lot of it I learned from some of my fellow preschool teachers - we were idea-swapping craft queens!

One of my very favorite ideas I got from another teacher was the ’shaving cream and glue’ craft! So much fun! I think we just put shaving cream and glue together and that was it…and it made PUFFY PAINT! Totally cool! I’ll have to look it up to make sure that it really was that easy. I know that we did add food coloring to it for different colors. That is a really fun one!

I’m so excited to revisit my crafty side - I will try to really dig us some good - and fun - stuff for all of us to do. And I’ll take pictures to share with you of the crafts my kids and I try!

Happy Crafting!