Project: Valentine's Day Heart Trees

I'm so behind on updating this blog... but I really wanted to share this project, since the girls and I had so much fun doing it.

I wanted to get the girls to do something homemade for their dad for Valentine's Day, and I saw a few neat ideas with hand prints and such online. However, since I knew I would be supervising the girls alone and that accidents happen quickly with two toddlers, I decided to modify what I found to be a little more me-friendly.

I started out with two very thick brown paper napkins, on which I traced each girl's hand and arm. We then cut them out and glued them onto a white piece of paper, though not super carefully, as I wanted the arms to look a bit rough and bumpy, like bark.

All ready to glue down

Next, I got out some brown paint and let the girls paint their trees so that they would be a bit brighter brown. They both really enjoyed this part - the older one for the fine motor skills, the younger one just so she could put paint everywhere!

The two-year-old's tree on the left, the four-year-old's on the
right

I had to get them to do something else for half an hour while the paint dried. That part, honestly, was the hardest part of the whole project! They were so excited to continue to make their trees that waiting for the paint to be dry was torture. Once it was all dry, I got the girls back in their crafting aprons and we got started on the leaves.

To make the leaves, I got out my red and shiny pink paint and cut a heart stamp out of a potato and helped the two of them stamp heart leaves on their tree. My oldest loved this part so much that she wanted to put hearts all over the page. The youngest decided to stick to leaves. And when I produced the red glitter glue, I thought I was going to have a riot on my hands, since they both wanted to use it first!

All done! Stamp and paint shown on the right

Just finished stamping

Drying

At the end, we wrote "Happy Valentine's Day" at the top and my oldest wrote her name at the bottom all by her self. If I had been a bit less pressed for time, we probably would have put something more sappy about love growing more every year, but I needed to get them off to bed... and we put this together on the 13th!

All in all, I would definitely do a project like this again with the girls.

Time required: 15 minutes hands-on time with a half an hour break to let the brown paint dry
Materials: brown paper/napkin
brown paint
paintbrushes
1 potato
Knife
Red paint
Pink paint
Red/pink sparkles