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?!