Sweet Valentines

Need a cute valentine idea… that you can make from your cupboards? Yes please!

So cute! This year I wanted to send valentines to a couple of my too distant buds, the ones geographically far, but personally close enough that they won’t judge if my craft goes bust 😉 I was inspired by a red paint chip Valentine Melinda sent a couple years ago and was thinking of what else I could use that comes in shades of red… cereal boxes!

As I stood in the cereal aisle ready to splurge on some brand-name red-boxed cereal, I realized that only the seriously sweet stuff comes in the red boxes. So, bonus, I get bags of candy cereal out of my crafty inspiration. Sugar highs for breakfast! (Notice the Lucky Charms were already missing before I even started…)

Anyway, to the crafting… I started by making a heart shaped template.

And traced it all over the boxes, aiming mostly for the red, purple and tasty looking parts of the box. I was aiming for a sweet cereal mosaic in the end. You could do the same thing with candy boxes or pretty much any other valentine-y colored paper or cardboard items you can think of.

I cut out all the whole heart shapes and then sliced each heart in half down the middle, followed by cutting all of those halves in half again to get quarters.

I did the quarter by placing the straight edge of the half-heart on the line of my cutting mat and marking one inch from the edge on the top and bottom. Then it was easy to run my scissor from point to point, quickly making the quarter pieces.

You could continue to cut the pieces down to get more and more of a mosaic look, but I thought the four pieces were cute. You could still appreciate the Fruit Loops and Lucky Charms with pieces this size. And who doesn’t love those?

Then I pieced them together in combinations of four, trying to mix up shades of colors and images. I used my mini hot glue gun to attach each set of four pieces to complementary colored scrapbook paper, but you could use any kind of craft glue. To finish these Valentines, I trimmed around the heart with a decorative scissor and wrote a little note on the back.

Isn’t that cute and simple? The only tricks are to make sure you make your heart template the right size to fit your envelope and allow space for the decorative paper edge and you’re good to go. Hope you all have a magnificent Valentine’s Day! Hugs from us.