Today we are spreading a little love with…
…laughter…
…sweet words…
…snuggles on the couch…
…sweet treats…
…and then maybe one more…
…a few sweet gifts…
…mama made…
…and sibling made…
…words of love from small…
…words of love from big…
… and hearts…
…all over…
…tied…
…glued…
… and taped…
…to everything…
…by children who are so happy to be celebrating love this Valentine’s Day and a family that is thankful for love everyday.
I can get very weighed down when I consider all the waste that this family produces despite our efforts with the three Rs (reduce, reuse, recycle). Even seeing how much goes out in our recycling bins feels a bit overwhelming because although I would say it’s better than nothing, recycling still takes a toll. I would like to see less coming into our home with the sole purpose of holding something until it leaves as waste – plastic, plastic, plastic.
My grandmother grew up in a large farming family during the Great Depression. The Depression ended but she has never forgotten the lessons that need dictated. I have always admired (and sometimes shaken my head) at the second, third or thirtieth use she finds for a thing which most of us would have long since discarded. My mom, while slightly less extreme, has learned many of these habits of saving, reusing and repurposing. My mom adds her environmental conscious to my grandmother’s thrifty ideals.
I’ve learned a lot from these resourceful women although I come nowhere close to their level of dedication. I love to find a second life for things but owing to our small space filled with growing little people I’m not able to hold on to too many things without having a planned use for them. One thing I do hold on to is calendars.
Each Christmas we usually receive at least one beautiful calendar and come the end of the year I always have a hard time tossing the old one into a bin for recycling so I often tuck them away somewhere with thoughts of finding a new use for them.
When we made our Valentine’s Day cards this week I thought of these calendars when it came to needing envelopes. The book that inspired our cards also had a page on making envelopes and calendar pages seemed a great alternative to a fresh piece of card stock. They are so easy I don’t know why we haven’t done it all along.
Here’s a quick peek at how the kids and I made these simple envelopes.
Using our handy dandy craft knife I cut a page out of our calendar.
Leaving about an inch on either side of the card, I cut the extra paper off the side (now I’m trying to figure out that to do with those leftover ends…).
I passed the tools over to my very willing helper who used the edge of the ruler as a guide to fold up the edge of the paper.
*I used the wrong side of the craft knife to score along the fold line for a neater fold.
Repeat on the opposite side.
With the middle of the card about an inch above the middle of the page fold the bottom up to cover the card.
Glue this last fold down.
Fold the top down over the card.
And you have a so-simple-you-didn’t-really-need-a-step-by-step envelope.
Add a label for mailing and close with glue, tape, ribbon or twine depending on whether it will going into a mail slot or hand delivered.
There are lots of fun possibilities to dream up with these – different papers, different sizes, different closures. I foresee plenty of these envelopes in our future.
These were so easy, the kids were so proud of their new skill and there is one less calendar saved in the basement!
For little goodies to share with some friends as an early Valentine’s Day treat we decided to make mini lemon loaves. Cupcakes are usually my go-to special occasion treats but as we are doing this sooner than last minute (for a rare change), I wanted something that would hold up a couple of days.
I’ve made this recipe once before and we loved it. I don’t know what has stopped me from making lemon pound cake before but the floodgates have been opened and we are hooked. I’ve tweaked the original recipe a little and we are very happy with the results.
The first time I made a double recipe and ended up with two loaves. This time for gifting purposes I decided to make mini loaves – I got eight mini loaves and five small cupcakes from the same double recipe.
Cream butter and sugar in a mixer with a paddle or in a large bowl with a wooden spoon.
Mix in the eggs and scrape down the sides of the bowl with a spatula or spoon.
Measure out the milk and add to it the vanilla, lemon juice and lemon essential oil, if using.
Add these liquids to the mixing bowl and combine.
In a separate bowl, combine flour, salt and baking powder. Using a rasp, grate in the zest of two lemons – be careful not to grate in the white pith.
*If you don’t have a rasp, use a fine grater. We didn’t have a rasp for the longest time but it has been a great investment. They are about $20 which may seem a bit steep but we use ours almost daily and it has worked so much better than any other zesting or fine grating tool we have used before. We use this one.
Being careful not to over mix, add the dry mixture into your butter mixture. You’ll end up with a lovely thick batter.
To make these extra special I added about a teaspoon of raspberry jam to each loaf.
I used a large ice cream scoop, added one scoop to each mini pan, drizzled a little jam across the top, then finished them off with another scoop of batter. I’ve done the same with cupcakes and regular sized loaves and while the cakes are delicious without it, I love the extra tang the raspberry adds.
Bake until they are golden brown and a toothpick comes out clean.
Raspberry Swirl Lemon Loaf
(original recipe here)
2 1/2 cups white unbleached flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
1 teaspoon salt
zest of two lemons
1 cup butter, at room temperature
1 3/4 cups sugar
4 eggs
1 1/3 cup milk
2 teaspoons pure vanilla extract
2 tablespoons fresh lemon juice
5 drops of pure lemon essential oil, optional
raspberry jam
Preheat over to 350°F. Prepare pans by spreading with butter or lining with paper liners.
In a large bowl or mixer, cream butter and sugar using paddle attachment or wooden spoon. Add eggs, one at a time beating well, scrape down bowl if needed. Measure milk, add vanilla, lemon juice and lemon oil, if using. Mix well.
In a smaller bowl combine flour, salt and baking powder. Grate in lemon zest. Stir to combine.
Gradually add dry ingredients to the wet mixture, do not over mix.
For large loaves: pour 1/4 of batter into each prepared loaf pan, drizzle 2 tablespoons of raspberry jam in each pan and swirl with a chopstick or fork. Spread remaining batter equally in pans. Bake for 45 – 55 minutes, or until golden brown.
For mini-loaves or cupcakes: Using an ice cream scoop or 1/4 cup measure, half fill each cup with batter, swirl 1/2 – 1 teaspoon of jam in each one and top with remaining batter. Bake for 25 – 35 minutes, or until golden brown.
The original recipe calls for a glaze after they come out of the oven. I used it the first time but not this time and didn’t find I missed it. I’m not really a glaze person – after all the sugar I’ve already added I get nervous about adding more. If you’d like to try it though, it does add a nice sheen and extra sweetness.
Glaze
1 cup icing sugar
1/4 cup lemon juice
Whisk these two together in a small bowl and set aside until the loaves are done.
When the loaves come out of the oven pierce the tops with a skewer and pour glaze over the top.
For gifting, we stamped parchment and wax paper (when we ran out of parchment) with a red heart stamp. We wrapped our mini-loaves, stamp side out, in the paper, tied them with red twine and added watercolour tags with kitchen twine (while the kids were cutting hearts, I cut gift tags).
Sweet little treats.
*We’ve been busy with Valentine’s projects all week – and we have more to come so be sure to check back! The kids are not giving me a break!*
More hearts in the jay household today. I love seeing how excited these kids get about a theme!
Last week we got out the watercolours – mostly of the red and pink variety – and sat down to paint.
It has been a while since I used my watercolour paints. I absolutely love painting with watercolours (although I have no idea what I am doing) but don’t get them out often enough because I get that painting-is-messy syndrome. It becomes a big deal in my head to get it out and clean it up. Of course my head gets it blown way out of proportion because when I do brave a painting session with the littles it (usually) goes great. They love it as much as I do and now that my big girls are getting older there is much more help with the clean up.
There is something about spreading that watery paint across the page.
Watching it bloom.
Observing how the colours mix and mingle.
So calming, peaceful and focused yet mind-wanderingly simple.
Cheap therapy.
After our papers were full we used these water colour crayons to add whatever designs we fancied – there were more hearts.
We tried painting over our crayon designs with water and also dipping the tips of the crayons in water before drawing for a deeper colour.
While we’re here I would like to put my vote in for buying quality art supplies for kids (and yourself). It makes such a difference. With this project we used both higher and lower quality paper and paints (leftover from my more miserly years) and we certainly noticed a difference. The cheaper paints were mostly dried up and the cheap paper curled at the edges when it got wet. There are certain special pens, markers and pencil crayons that I don’t let the kids have free reign over but I would rather have them use quality materials that will last and perform well over cheap supplies that will need frequent replacing or cause unnecessary frustration.
We gave our paintings plenty of drying time…er, plenty…as in a week since craft time just did not seem to be happening. Then using a heart cookie cutter we traced hearts all over the back of our papers.
We cut out our hearts.
A very eager seven-year-old set them around the table in pairs.
We gathered red yarn and an embroidery hoop and tied a length of yarn to the hoop. We glued our heart pairs around the yarn (yarn going in between the two hearts).
We continued in the same way, tying lengths around the hoop until we were happy with how it looked.
We attached three more pieces of yarn with the length going above the hoop. Being careful that our three lengths were equal we tied them together at the top and hung our heart mobile from a handy ceiling hook.
We got the idea from MJ, who was inspired by this tutorial – I love the grapevine wreaths!
We were so excited with this one that we made a second, smaller mobile which currently hangs over a sleeping babe’s head.
I have a feeling we will be making more of these as new themes spring to our imaginations!
Thanks for joining us for more Valentine’s Day crafting!
My husband and I don’t make a big deal of Valentine’s Day. Maybe a card and maybe a chocolate fondue (I am usually pretty insistent on that last point) but no gifts. I can be a pretty sappy romantic but a holiday that makes so many people feel like something is lacking seems a little out of whack. And that is not even taking into account the money-grab so many stores make of it. Bah humbug, right?
That being said, though, although Dan and I don’t make a big deal of the day, the kids and I have so much fun with it. Winter is long and cold around here, February being one of the worst offending months, so we make the most of the excuse to decorate the house, craft with red and pink, bake fattening sweets and share the love with some of our favourite people.
We are thick into Valentine’s dreams and planning around here this week – the last two mornings I have come down to hearts galore, red construction paper and a tableful of kids who love to gift (how great is that?). The trick is for me to keep up with all the elaborate plans that they (and I) have put together for gifts, crafts, decorations and goodies.
Today we checked some names off our lists of valentines with these super fun and easy cards. I had debated about including glitter, paint and, glitter paint, but maybe the best part of these valentines was the lack of anything too messy. I caught a break there.
The idea came from this great book.
First I cut tin foil squares. I started out using an craft knife but found that tearing it off on the edge of the ruler made for a much smoother cut.
Then using Sharpies in pink and silver we drew hearts and swirls over our foil squares. We chose light colours more to give the impression of a design without overwhelming the foil with colour.
I kept snapping pictures because I couldn’t get enough of the little fingers grasping markers and little heads bent over their work. (On a side note, someone needs to put some clips in this kid’s hair – more on that later.)
We ended up with lots of foils like these.
We punched out lots and lots of hearts (and argued a little over whose turn it was to use the punch).
While they were swirling and punching I cut and folded cards like these from red card stock.
Then free license reigned and the kids decorated hearts, glued hearts and amazingly didn’t decorate themselves with Sharpies!
This girl was serious about completing her valentines.
This boy was serious about the punches.
This girl was serious about the glue.
Oh we had fun – and all while little brother was napping. I caught another break there.
I kind of want to do it again tomorrow.
Another Valentine’s Day craft to share tomorrow! I’ll give you a hint – there was more red, pink, hearts and glue – who would’ve guessed?!