Valentine, You're Griffindorable!!

With Valentine's day fast approaching, we are hard at work making our valentines.  As we are pretty big Harry Potter fans here and with the anticipated new Harry Potter movie coming out in November (you can see a trailer for it HERE), Rini decided her valentines this year would be wands.

We printed the valentines on thick card stock and cut them out. Then punched a whole through each one and used string to tie them to the wands. You can get a set of your own awesome Harry Potter valentines at Art by STOWE.

To make your own Harry Potter wands you will need:

• Printer paper
• Hot glue gun
• Hot glue sticks
• Acrylic or craft paints (we used black and brown but you can add other colors too)
• Marbles or gems (to add to the base- this is optional)
• Wooden dowels (this is optional but add support to the wands and makes them more sustainable)

Begin by taking a dowel (if using them) and placing it diagonally across one corner or a piece of printer paper. Grab the corner and place it on the dowel. You can tape it here with scotch tape if you want. Now roll the paper and dowel (as tightly as you can) until you get to the end of the paper. Once there, secure paper corner to the paper wand with a bit of hot glue.

If you aren't using a dowel, you will do the same process, just without the dowel. Start at a corner of your printer paper and roll (as tightly as possible) diagonally across the paper. Once at the end, secure with hot glue.

For both wands, you will need to fill the inside of the wand with hot glue.  If using the dowel, its easier as you have less of an area to fill. Fill both ends (and middle if not using the dowel) of your wand with the hot glue. Be patient as this part can take a while. 

If you wanted to add a gem or marble ot one end, now is the time to do that.

Once your wands are filled and dried, you can use the hot glue to make designs on them. Rini wanted them to look like wood, so we made a wood fiber like pattern on all the wands. You could though build up areas and make larger 3D decorations on wands.

We found that its best to do one side of a wand before doing the other as the glue is hot and doesn't always dry as fast as we would like. 

Next comes the painting part. Take your acrylics and paint the colors and designs you want on your wands. Since we wanted ours to look like wood, Rini first painted them brown. Once the paint had dried, we made a black wash to paint over the brown. The black wash will pool up in the crevices and create a sort of rugged and aged look, making the paper to look more like actual wood.  To make a wash, simply add a little bit of paint to a cup and mix with water. Start with a little water and add more until you get the desired liquid base. For us, we used a 1:2 ratio. 

Once they were dried from the wash, we added our cards and viola,  Harry Potter wands for all.

Happy valentine's Day everyone!

Valentine's Day Bookmarks



Here we are in 2013 and can you believe that I got away with not making valentines until this year.  Maybe that's not so hard to believe for some, but I was raised that valentines were made not bought. I have several fond memories of sitting at the kitchen table with my mom into what I thought at the time were the wee hours of the morning putting together Valentines for my classmates.

This year Rini decided she wanted to make her valentines after she stumbled across these adorable little owl bookmarks on pinterest.

Rini herself, is an avid reader and wanted to share her love of books with her class. And so, the bookmark valentines were born. :)

Ours turned out a bit different, but still cute I thought. Rini did almost all the work and in two days after school made 30 bookmark valentines.

Here is what we used:

• Card stock- for bookmark base and heart base
• Pattern Paper- (left over from pages in our scrapbook) for the inside part of the base and inside of heart
• Clip Art- image we found on google
• 2" Circle hand punch
• 3 in 1 scallop circle hand punch
• Scissors
• Glue sticks
• Printer for the saying and clip art image
• Stapler
• Ribbon Scraps
• Pencil for marking and signing name
• Suckers for treats (were attached using paper clips)

The process we used was pretty simple. First we cut the card stock to the size we wanted the bookmarks. Then measure and cut the pattern paper you want on the bookmark. We decided ours should be smaller than the bookmark as we wanted some of the card stock to show and frame the pattern paper. Then glue these two pieces together. We ended up with the above image once this step was complete.

Thirdly we printed out a few sheets of the clip art image (cat and dog) and used the circle punch  to cut them out. In order to make the scallop border around the circle, we used a scallop circle punch that we had at the house. However, our scallop circle punch is much smaller than the 2" circle punch so after asking Rini what she wanted to do about it, she decided that if we punched out several and glued them to the back of the circles it would create approximately the same effect. So that's what we did. We ended up punching out 5 scallop circles per 1  2" circle.  Of course you wouldn't have to do this step or you could hand cut out a border for the circle part.
Once they were all glued together we ended up with these.


The fourth step were the hearts which are made up of three pieces. First, choose the card stock you want. Rini chose green as its the opposite on the color wheel from red. Now measure how big you want the hearts and cut them out. If you have a heart hand punch you could use that, but we cut all 30 of ours by hand.

The next step was to cute the pattern paper into smaller hearts so they would fit inside the green card stock ones. For this we measured the green hearts and cut the paper into slightly smaller squares. Then traced a green heart on each square. Once that was done we tore the paper along the line to make the hearts. The result is the uneven and white line around the pattern paper hearts. Now glue those two pieces together. Thirdly, we came up with two sayings, typed them out in word, printed them and then cut them out. These were then glued on top of the hearts.

The fifth step is the ribbon. We used scraps of ribbon and folded them in half. Then using a stapler, stapled the ribbon to the top of one of the bookmarks before gluing our circles over the stapled ribbon. This hides the staple on the front.

Lastly, you glue all pieces together. This is what we ended up with when it was all done.

The bookmarks weren't perfect but they were well received and I don't know about her class, but mine will be well loved and cherished!!