Here are instructions for making a a ribbon trimmed Valentine’s Day heart and a dotted Valentine’s Day heart.
Ribbon Trimmed Valentine’s Day Heart
This is a super-easy craft that you can so even with very young children. It makes a very pretty Valentine’s Day card with space to write or draw in the center. It also makes a nice decoration that you can hang up on a wall, or on a child’s bedroom door. If you do his project with a classroom group, they can hang on the children’s desks with their names on them.
Supplies:
Construction paper in holiday colors
Scissors
Ribbon
Hole punching tool
Step 1 ~
Using your scissors, start by cutting out a heart shape from construction paper. It can be any size you like, but if it’s smaller than about three inches, it’ll be much harder to work with. You can use a template, or just fold your paper in half, and cut a half-heart along the fold. When you unfold it, it’ll be a perfectly symmetrical heart.
Step 2 ~
Go around the edge of your paper heart, punching holes about every inch. The holes should be about half an inch in from the edge of the heart.
Step 3 ~
Cut a length of ribbon long enough to reach all the way around the perimeter of your heart, plus about a foot more. Starting at the bottom hole on one side or the other, thread the ribbon in and out the holes, going all around the heart. When you get around to the other side’s last hole, you’ll have a bit of ribbon coming from each of the bottom two holes dangling down. Try to make them even, or at least at close as you can.
Step 4 ~
Two those two dangling ends together in a nice bow.
Step 5 ~
In the open space in the middle, you can write a Valentine’s message. Younger kids may want to put a drawing there.
Dotted Heart Valentine
Save the ‘dots’ you made with the hole puncher in the first project, and you can use them as decorations in this one.
Supplies:
Construction paper in holiday colors
Scissors
Glue or glue stick
Step 1 ~
Using your scissors Cut out heart shapes in a variety of sizes. You can use a template, or just fold your paper in half, and cut a half-heart along the fold. When you unfold it, it’ll be a perfectly symmetrical heart. Make several. You can even make a hollow heart, by cutting a small heart shape out of a larger heart shape.
Step 2 ~
Pick to or three of your heart shapes that are at least half an inch different in size on each edge. Layer them on top of each other (centered) and glue them in place. You should end up with a half-inch or more border around each heart layer.
Step 3 ~
If you have dots saved from the other project, get them out now. Otherwise you can make dots. Use Construction paper, (even small scraps will work for this), and just hole-punch them a bunch of times and collect the little punched out ‘dots’.
Step 4 ~
Decorate your valentines by gluing the dots long that half-inch gap. You can make rows of a single color, or alternate between colors, or just make a series of random colors. In the center, solid, area of the heart, you could even spell out a message with dots. You could also form shapes or pictures out of colored dots, anything your imagination can dream up, you can probably make up with dots
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