Celery Printed Rose Wrapping Paper

In my last post we created Celery Printed Rose Valentines and they turned out really beautiful. The process is based on using the cut off bottom of celery to print with and create a rose shape. The natural progression was to create wrapping paper next. So that is what we did.  We used large sheets of tissue paper for printing on instead of paper. This is how they turned out:

Here are the celery bottoms dipped in paint that we used for printing.  Check out the post here to find out how our Valentines turned out.

Here is more of our Celery Rose Printed Wrapping Paper.  We put one of the Valentines on top for a gift tag for decoration. This project is a great lesson on teaching kids about all the different ways you can use one idea.

We experimented with using larger bottoms of celery too.  I loved how they looked and tried them on wrapping paper with great results too.

Happy Printing!

Dancing Candy Hearts Experiment

Do you have any left over candy hearts from Valentine's day? Well,  I have just the experiment that you can do with candy hearts that my daughter has been going crazy about the past few days.

Materials Needed:

Candy Hearts

Clear jar

1 cup of water

2 Tablespoons of baking soda 

about a 1/2 cup or more of vinegar

First, fill a small clear jar with about a cup of water.  Then put 2 Tablespoons of baking soda and stir.

After that,  put about 2 or 3 candy hearts in the mixture.  They will just sit at the bottom of the jar at first.

Then add the vinegar and the hearts will begin to dance or rise and fall! C was really excited how they were dancing!

We stirred them around to help the hearts move about.  Essentially the baking soda and vinegar are reacting to create carbon dioxide and bubbles and lifting the hearts up. In the end, the candy hearts just stayed at the top, but C had fun experimenting with adding more baking soda or vinegar to see if it they would dance or move more. This occupied her for a long time!

Happy Heart Experimenting!

Bubble Printed Valentine Hearts

My all time most popular post on the The Chocolate Muffin Tree is Bubble Printing and we revisited this technique just recently to create some Valentine Hearts. They turned out beautifully.

Materials Needed:
(Per color you need)
1/2 cup water
2 Tablespoons tempera paint
few squirts of dish soap
containers
straws
paper

We made Bubble Prints in this post here if you want to follow the tutorial with pictures. Basically you mix up the ingredients above in each container per each color. Then you blow into the mixture like you were blowing bubbles in milk (watch that little ones don't suck up the soapy mixture) and place a paper over the colored bubbles to create a print. The print is created as the bubbles pop. Each time you'll need to blow more bubbles to create more prints.

After you have a bunch of bubble printed papers, you can use them to create heart shapes.  We used construction paper in Valentine colors to frame our hearts. You could make these hearts into Greeting Cards or even Heart Garland.

Happy Bubble Printing and Happy Hearts Day!

Sweet Little Heart Cookies

We've made this recipe the past few years from Family Fun Magazine as Santa Hats, but since we forgot to make them for Christmas I told my daughter we could make a heart version of these for a Valentine Heart Cookie. They are basically a Meringue Cookie made with egg whites and sugar. Here is how they turned out:

Ingredients Needed:
2 egg whites, at room temperature
1/2 teaspoon cream of tartar
1/4 teaspoon vanilla extract
1/2 cup sugar
Red colored sugar
parchment paper

First heat the oven to 200 degrees F.  Then beat the egg whites until soft peaks form.  After that, add the cream of tartar, vanilla extract, and 1/2 sugar. Continue to beat until peaks stiffen.  Then we put the mixture into a gallon size plastic bag and cut a corner off the bag for a makeshift piping bag.

Then on a parchment paper lined cookie sheet, pipe the hearts with the bag filled with the egg white mixture.

Next, fill the inside of the heart like this.

Here is C hard at work in the process.

Lastly, sprinkle the colored sugar on the hearts and cook for 1 hour and 20 minutes at 200 degrees F. Cook them until they are hard, but not browned. The recipe advised to turn off the oven and let the cookies sit for an hour before removing. ***We took them right out and they were fine.

My daughter loves these sweet cookies and we already need to make some more!

Chocolate Sugar Cookie Hearts

Happy Valentine's Day! I've enjoyed sharing all our Valentine/Heart ideas the past few weeks!  We've been very busy the past fews day preparing for the big day! Mostly we've been working on making edible treats to share with friends, family, and neighbors.  Yesterday we made these wonderful Chocolate Sugar Cookie Hearts!  They are identical to our  Chocolate Christmas Sugar Cookies except for the shape and color of them! We followed the recipe here at Myrecipes.com !  We also made our Super Easy Chocolate Covered Strawberries from last year! (My absolute FAVORITE for Valentine's Day) Hope you have wonderful Valentine's Day and may it be the beginning of Loving of all those around you!  A simple smile to a stranger might be the best Valentine gift you give!!!

"Not all of us can do great things.  But we can do small things with great love." -Mother Teresa

"I have witnessed the softening of the hardest of hearts by a simple smile."  -Goldie Hawn

YUMMY!

Super Easy Chocolate Covered Strawberries

What Valentine gifts did you make?

Give a smile today to those around you!

Shaving Cream Marbled Valentine Hearts

I absolutely LOVE this process and have done it many times, but never did a post about it.....so here it  is! We made Marbled Valentine Hearts with shaving cream! Here are some of our beauties.  We put them on a string/yarn as a decoration to hang vertically or as a garland!

To create marbled papers of any kind you need:

Shaving Cream/foam

a tray of some kind

Water colors or food coloring + water

brushes/eye droppers

sticks of any kind or combs

paper

a plastic lid cut in half or piece of cardboard

To begin,  spread shaving cream in a tray and flatten the top a bit like this.  About an inch deep of shaving cream.

Now drip watered down paint or food coloring with a paint brush or eye dropper on the surface of the shaving cream.

Then,  take a stick or comb and swirl around the paint to create zig zags, curvy lines, or whatever you choose.

Then lay down a paper on the marbled shaving cream.

Lift up the paper and you'll have something like this! (not finished yet)

Now take a straight edged piece of plastic or piece of cardboard (we used a plastic lid cut in half), and scrape the shaving cream off the heart. Messy!

Under the shaving cream layer will reveal a GORGEOUS marbled effect! Let them dry for a few hours.

Then we glued them on colored paper to frame them.  Here is a close up of one of my favorite marbled hearts.

Here are bunches of our marbled shaving cream hearts! Love them all!

After we made bunches of hearts C just wanted to play in the shaving cream which is always a FAVORITE!

We've had fun with shaving cream in these posts too:

Super Easy Shaving Cream Bathtub Paint

Shaving Cream Cloud Paint

This post is linked to: Link and Learn, Craft Schooling Sunday, Learn Through Play Monday

Paper Bag Puffy Heart

We are taking part in TinkerLab's Paper Bag Challenge along with many other bloggers.  Hope you check out all the ideas other blogs have done with paper bags after this post!  We've made a few things with paper bags before,  including our Fandango Inspired Paper Bag Puppets and Paper Bag Self Portraits...hope you check those out too.  Paper Bags are so versatile and the great thing is that you can cut them apart to create a surface to paint on or create a sculpture too!  We did both!  Since Valentines and hearts have been our minds, we decided to make a three dimensional version of our Heart Blotto Valentines that we did a couple weeks ago and we also did Heart Blotto T-shirts too!!  Here is one of our Paper Bag Puffy Hearts floating on a cloud of poly-fil stuffing.

To begin, I first cut apart a larger paper bag so that I could cut two identical paper bag hearts.  You want two hearts: one for the back and one for the front. Then we folded the hearts and created blottos.  First paint on one side of the heart.

Then fold over to transfer to the other side of the heart. You can keep repeating the process until you like what you see.

Here are two hearts that will go together.  Beautiful!

After the hearts are dry,  put a ring of glue on one side,  but leave an opening to later put poly-fil stuffing, newspaper, or even pieces of scrap paper.  Let dry.

Next stuff your heart. You can use a ruler or stick to get all the stuffing back in the tight corners. After finished stuffing,  you can either glue the opening and wait to dry or staple!  We were impatient and just stapled the last bit together.

We wanted to add yarn around the heart,  so first I punched holes all around the heart.  Then C sewed around the heart.  Great fine tuning of motor skills!

When finished sewing with yarn,  tie a knot and create a hanger for the heart.  Here is C holding two of our hearts.  She loved swinging them about....an active girl....no doubt!

Here is another Paper Bag Puffy Heart!  We had a lot of FUN!  You could make any type of stuffed shape....such as a fish, person, or even a cloud shape!   This is C's "Tree Blotto With Red Apples".

Thanks TinkerLab for inspiring us to create with paper bags!  Be sure to check out all the other Great ideas in the linky below!  Please let me know what you think of our idea too!

This post is linked to: Made By You Mondays, Craft Schooling Sunday, Link And Learn, Show And Tell

Heart Blotto T-shirts and {The Heart Project}

Remember our Heart Blotto Valentines? We made some lovely ones in this post last week! Well, now we have created some Beautiful Heart Blotto T-shirts based on this same idea! Take a look.

To create some of your own Heart Blotto T-shirts you need:

Fabric paint (we used.... Tulip Dimensional Fabric Paint )

paper in heart shapes

plenty of newspaper

a t-shirt or two

First,  cut the size of heart you want from some fairly sturdy paper.  Fold the heart in half and get your fabric paint and newspaper ready.  Also have your t-shirt(s) ready with a piece of cardboard or newspaper (or cardboard) inside the shirt so the paint won't leak to the other side.

Paint on one side of the heart with the fabric paint.  

Then close up the painted paper heart so that it transfers to the other side. Rub the paper.  You may want to put newspaper on top just in case the paint squirts out. (I forgot to take a picture of the paper folded....so here it is before it is folded!)

Then open up the heart and you have a beautiful Heart Blotto. If there is too much paint (as you can see there is!)  print one heart on  a piece of newspaper so some will transfer off.

Now take the heart and carefully flip it to where you want it on your t-shirt!

Then take a piece of clean newspaper and put it on top while smoothing over the painted heart blotto.

***Our newspaper had paint on it so we got mess around the heart....oops! Carefully remove the painted heart from the shirt too!

Since we had this (oops!), I improvised and painted around the heart! C loved it ! This was a good lesson in how mistakes can makes things more beautiful or how they can force you to be more creative! Here is C's shirt again.

Here is my shirt without the Lovely design around it.

Which heart design do you prefer? 

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NEWS FLASH: the heart project

Speaking of Hearts.... my friend Jamie from hands on: as we grow is having a fundraiser for the American Heart Association called The Heart Project with 70  bloggers (including me) involved.  Bloggers from around the world have submitted over 100 Creative "Heart" projects for a book called: the heart book.  It is available in e-book format as well as in print form to purchase.  The proceeds of this book will go directly to The American Heart Association.

You can make a $5.00 donation to The American Heart Association and receive the heart book (ebook). The ebook includes links to the projects that you see on the pages of the book.  For every book purchased this month, CraftProjectIdeas.com will be donating $1.00 (up to $500.00) on behalf  of The American Heart Association.

You can also purchase the soft cover book for $20.00 (+shipping).  The soft cover book is full of beautiful color images and is 8.5" x 8.5".  For every book purchased $5.00 will be donated to The American Heart Association.

US $20.00

Order the Printed Version

This book will only be available through the month of February!

Preview of the book:

If you would like to simply make a donation to The American Heart Association, without purchasing the book feel free to do so here:

Check out Hands On: As We Grow here for more information about this project!

Including: Information about Fundraiser Auctions from Sponsors, Special Giveaways, and a list of all The Contributing Heart Project Bloggers!