Valentine's Day Projects ~ I Love Your Guts!

These are a few of the projects I did for Valentine's Day. I wish I would have done them a little earlier because I stayed up way too late last night. I couldn't be happier though. Sometimes I wonder why I put myself through the heartache of painstakingly hand making every little thing.  Maybe it's because I have such crafty friends who are so talented and I feel  like I need to keep up but lately I blame pinterest! I see all these great ideas and think "I can totally do that" and I can... I just don't have time to do it all.  I bet if I spent a little less time pinning and a little more time actually crafting I would get more done :) but when it's all said and done I am always really glad when I see the end results.

I'll start with these adorable valentines I made for Olivia's class. (I think they would also make cute invites for a monkey themed shower or birthday party) I got the idea from pinterest of course. It was from the fiskars website. It has great directions so i won't write them here but it used 5 different cutters that they sell. I didn't have any of those cutters so I just played around with sizes on my cricut until I got this.
2 1/2'" circle
2" heart
2 1/4" oval
1" circle
Instead of using the 1/8" hole punch for eyes I used googly eyes. I just love me some googly eyes! I put everything together with a glue stick and glue dots. I printed out tags for the back using trace letters so she could write her name herself. She was so proud of herself and so was I. She's only 2, so to me this is pretty impressive. She loves to "write" and draw so much so I just printed a tracing sheet for her with her name. She loves to do it so I printed more. I think I will laminate a couple sheets and let her have at it with dry erase markers.

I also made this little gift for her teacher. It's hanitizer! That's what Olivia calls hand sanitizer. I just removed all the labels and used some goo remover stuff to get the rest of the sticky stuff off. I used my cricut to make this too. I know it took me a year to take my cricut out of the box but now that I have really started using it I LOVE it so much! My friend Keli has a program called Sure Cuts A Lot that allows you to use files from your computer on your cricut. It basically does a lot of the same things cricut craft room does but with that program you still have to have all the cartridges. SCAL can use any font you have in word or download from sites like dafont.com. I can also download tons of images or make my own (which I haven't tried yet). It saves a ton of money on cartridges.

And finally, my favorite project is the card I made for Nic. When we first started dating I would say "I love your guts!" I said it to my friends too, sort of the opposite of I hate your guts, right? Anyway, in the beginning (before I could admit I actually loved all of him) I would just say this. I have said this for years but I never thought to make it into a card... until pinterest. I don't know how to embroider but when I saw this pic I just knew I HAD to make this for him. I did make some changes but I'm not sure if they were actually improvements or not. He loved it though. He actually laughed out loud, gave me a big hug and kiss and said it was "perfect". It's kind of an inside joke now so he's probably the only one who would enjoy this kind of card. I also made him an etched beer mug but I think I'll write about that later since this post is already so long.