My daughter and I were at Target recently, and she saw all the cute Valentine's Day cards and stickers. She was begging me to buy some to bring to school on the 14th! I convinced her that we would have more fun making Valentine crafts for all of her friends, and the crafts would mean more because she had put time and energy into them. I sealed the deal by saying we would make Valentine's Day cupcakes to bring in too!
The first project we embarked upon were stickers, and we did have a lot of fun. I found this About.com article on Free Valentine's Day Clip-art and we downloaded a few images from each site to make our stickers:
http://freebies.about.com/od/valentines-day-freebies/tp/free-valentine-clip-art.htm
We scaled the images down and printed them on plain label paper that we had leftover from when we made return address labels. The label paper isn't too expensive at Staples or somewhere like that, and we made 2 stickers out of each label. We had to cut them all ourselves, but it was well worth it! My daughter even colored on some and added tiny stars and polka dots to personalize the stickers.
For the cards, we used some of the images we had downloaded for the stickers, but we also designed some images ourselves. We used the Paint program on our computer to design some hearts and stars and fun words. My daughter liked this part a lot, since she was able to design some of the pieces. We printed the cards on regular white paper, and there were so many designs and words on each one that you could barely see the white!
We made homemade vanilla cupcakes that we dyed pink by adding powdered freeze-dried strawberries. The process was super simple, we picked up some freeze-dried strawberries on sale and put them in the food processor until they turned to powder. We added them to the cupcake mix and OMG what delicious pink cupcakes! Here is the recipe we used for the basic vanilla cupcake recipe:
http://mysanfranciscokitchen.com/homemade-vanilla-cupcakes/
We doubled the recipe so that some could go to school and some could stay at home! We did use a whole bag (about 12 oz.) of freeze-dried strawberries to dye the cupcakes, but it was so much yummier and healthier than food coloring, and they weren't very expensive at all!
For the frosting, we used a recipe from the same site (there's a link on the cupcake recipe page, make sure you let the cupcakes cool first). We had some red writing icing (store bought) leftover from a previous project, so we drew hearts on each cupcake with the writing icing (you could use any color, or make extra homemade icing and dye it to make the hearts or words). My daughter's class was so impressed that we made homemade delicious heart cupcakes for them! They couldn't believe how yummy they were, and that we didn't use food coloring to dye them pink! It was fun seeing all the kids' faces as they received their little gifts...they sure did love those cupcakes! Even more than the stickers :) Thank goodness we saved some at home for my husband!
Hope this helps make your Valentine's Day extra special, and not so expensive <3
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