Diane Again: Sweet Valentine Treats

Monday, February 6, 2012

Sweet Valentine Treats

Two sweet little Valentine morsels to share.

First, you know how I feel about making Valentine cards. Well, here are the ones I made last year.

Using watercolors and watercolor paper, I painted several pages full of red, pink, orange and yellow stripes. In some areas, I let the stripes blend and blur together, as watercolors so willingly agree to do, but I enforced some discipline among other stripes by allowing one color to dry before I added the neighboring bands of color.

Once the watercolors were completely dry, I ripped super narrow strips of light pink and dark pink tissue paper and glued them over the painted stripes, layering sometimes within a painted stripe and sometimes along the boundary between two stripes. As you can see in the pics, I kept all the stripes moving in the same direction for a unified look.

And once the glue on the tissue paper had dried, I grabbed a few glitter pens and added some bands of glitter. Again, I kept all the stripes flowing along together. Sometimes I made very narrow stripes, other times quite wide, and sometimes I even smudged them with my fingers to make them more delicate and less globby. You know how ornery and uncooperative some glitter pens can be.

The next day, I flipped over these finished sheets, and used a heart-shaped cookie cutter to trace out the shapes. Using my finest tipped Sharpie pen, I wrote "Happy Valentine's Day" on all the fronts, and then a more personal message on the back.

Fun, easy and super sweet. This project could definitely work for a family with children of varying ages...even a wee one in a high chair can swing a paintbrush, and who wouldn't want baby art for Valentine's Day??

Valentine morsel number two: I used my newly thrifted little red cups to serve Valentine peanut M&Ms for dessert last night. So simple. So sweet. So satisfyingly cute.