Valentine's Crafts & Treats!

Atticus was sick today, so he stayed home from school. The two younger boys had preschool this morning so Atticus, Thea Belle and I had a morning of crafts. Then we picked up Dietrich and Lincoln and after lunch we made some treats.

Atticus made a regular one, a tiny one and a big spider-monster one. The spider-monster is for his teacher.

I figure everyone knows how to make pom poms but when I looked up how to do it, I couldn't find the way my mom taught me when I was little. It is so much easier than the two-donut-cardboard way -- easy enough for a motivated, fairly-coordinated elementary-school kid. Though, Atticus was not motivated.

After wrapping the yarn around a square of cardboard, bend the cardboard and pull the loop off. Try keeping its shape intact as best you can.

Cut a length of yarn about 6 inches long and tie it around the center of the loops. Do it tight!

Then cut the loops open. Be careful not to cut the tie holding it all together.

When you're done it can look pretty funky. Just trim it to make it tidy. If it looks too sparse for your liking, next time wrap more yarn around the cardboard.

And this is how it looked AFTER I cleaned up most of the yarn scraps.

Atticus working on valentines.

This year I decided to do a little less elaborate ones than last year. This was partly because Dietrich and Lincoln are both in a preschool which does all-school holiday parties, so this year I needed to make 40 valentines EACH for them and Atticus had 28 for his class. That is a lot of valentine-making. So for Atticus I found this cute idea for tracing his hands and folding down the two middle fingers to make a sign language "I love you." Then I thought it'd be fun to put valentine's pencils in the finger loops.

I've had this valentine treat idea for a few years and decided that this was the year! I actually gathered the ingredients for my mother-in-law to do with the kids while Brad and I were gone this past weekend, but she ended up getting the stomach flu and most of their projects together had to be put aside. So I made these with the kids after lunch today. They are super easy but out-of-control messy (eek!). You just unwrap caramels. Put them on a plate (not touching). Slightly soften them in the microwave. Then you smash them between two vanilla wafers and stick a lollipop stick (from Jo-Anns, Wilton brand) in the caramel. Then we melted some chocolate chips; Dipped in the pops and sprinkled them with valentine candies. We found out you can't really dip them in the sprinkles because the chocolate just blobs off into the sprinkle-bowl. Then you let them cool for a bit (if you can wait (-:).