Valentine's Day 2012 (part 2)

After the Christmas decorations were put away, my brain began to spin about Valentine's Day.  I looked around on the web for some sources of inspiration and came to this article showing how to make salt dough magnets. It passed our test of being ridiculously time-consuming, so we set out to make these.

Making the dough was very simple.  Since it closely resembled cookie dough, Connor didn't believe me that dough containing half a cup of salt would not taste good. Unfortunately, I didn't have the foresight to capture his taste test, though it closely resembled the time when he didn't believe me about lemon juice, as seen in this video.  When he finds the baker's chocolate in the cabinet, I will be sure to have the camera ready.

Cara rolling out the dough

Cutting out the hearts

After we had all of the dough cut into small and large hearts, we baked the dough for 2 hours.  When the dough had cooled, we began painting them with acrylic paint.  Since we were using quite vibrant paint colors, we ended up having to put about 4 coats of paint on each side.  Needless to say, our craft area was overrun by day-glo hearts for about a week.

Midway through the painting process

And here are the hearts after the painting was through. 
(Like the Chewbacca cup?)

When the million coats of paint were dry, I warmed up the hot glue gun and started gluing small hearts on big hearts.  Cara then took to the paint pens and personalized and decorated each of the hearts.  It was so sweet how she paid attention to what colors each of her friends liked and what design she thought they would appreciate the best.  

When she was done, we had sets of

pins

earrings

and bookmarks.

After all of the gifts were assembled, we cut up some card stock, glued a couple of pieces of different card stock together, used our heart hole-puncher, attached the hearts, and Cara wrote out some Valentine's Day greetings for each recipient. She even managed to include a personal joke or inside reference for each card, another detail that just shows you how thoughtful a kid she is.

This project was messy, less than economical, and very time-consuming.  Not only would I do it all again, I would look forward to it.  Cara and I get to spend some awesome one-on-one crafting time together.  We love this annual tradition so much, we've actually purchased some items for next year's Valentine's Day.