Be My Valentine!

I could grumble about the silly "shoebox snack" project that the second grader has to do for Valentine's Day, but instead I have a gift for you. Your kid is probably expected to bring in valentines for the whole class, right? And if you're like me, you have zero interest in buying some ugly branded character cards at the drugstore, right? You could do what we did when I was a kid, and glue cut-out hearts on a doily, or you could be more twenty-first century crafty clever.

I'd seen cute cellphone valentines in two places - a folding one on Family Fun, and a flat one on Dandee (which I found through The Crafty Crow). We could have cobbled something together based on the sketchy instructions given in those two sources, but instead, my husband made a template that let us print out four on a two-sided sheet, with the only trimming to be done on the ends and the corners. Snip, trim, cut and glue, and we had 24 valentines done in a jiffy.

If you'd like to make up a mess of cell phone valentines, download the pdf I put up on Scribd, get yourself some card stock and find some candy buttons - the little sugar blobs on a strip of adding machine tape. The pdf includes a fill-in box for your kid's name, and each of the four valentines has different text. Experiment with your printer to figure out how to get page 1 and page 2 properly back to back. You'll probably need to make a couple of test runs - do that on plain paper so you don't waste card stock - and then you'll want to run out several copies of page 1 and then run them through again for page 2. We used yellow card stock because we had it; silver would be more cell-phone-like. Once they're all printed, you'll just need to trim the ends, cut the phones apart, fold, and round off the corners. Then get to work with a glue stick and add the candy keypad. Some of this is work you'll have to do, but some of it is certainly kid-appropriate - depending on the kid's age.

Have fun!