Homemade Valentine’s Pouches – Easy, Cute, & Cheap!

Like I mentioned in my Menu Plan Monday post, we were snowed in almost all of last week. By Friday we were starting to run out of ideas, so I decided to get creative and come up with a craft project. With Valentine’s Day right around the corner, I thought it would be fun to make something for the boys to take to their friends at day care. This is something easy, inexpensive, and it provides a little bit of a twist on the traditional Valentine.

I wasn’t well-stocked with art supplies, but I looked around and found some unused sponges (thank goodness for being lazy about housework!):

I used scissors to cut out some shapes. At first I tried cutting the sponges dry and then after a minute of seeing how impossible that was going to be, it finally dawned on me to wet the sponges – then it was much easier!

Then I found some paint – I had red & white, so I mixed different amounts together to get some pinks to work with too:

Then J got to work stamping paint onto folded cardstock.

He made a LOT (C wasn’t too interested, so J did all the stamping):

and he was pretty proud of his work:

Instead of stamping the designs on like you normally would, we did it with the fold at the bottom, so we could turn the Valentines into little pouches to carry treats in. I hot glued the sides and attached ribbon as a handle – super easy, and cute!

We’re going to stamp a J or C on the backs of the pouches and write a little Valentine’s message to personalize them. You could do all kinds of fun things for the design, too! What kind of Valentines are your kids going to take this year?