DIY Valentine Heart Suncatchers

Hello Monday!  I hope you all had a wonderful love-filled, sugar-coated, heart-shaped, chocolate-covered Valentine's Day weekend.  Ryan bought me a gallon of wine, some chocolate covered strawberries and let me sleep in on Saturday until 10:00 a.m.  It was the best day ever!  He sure knows the way to my heart.  

I mentioned last week that we were lucky enough to get to participate in two blogger Valentine exchanges this year. This one was organized by two of my favorite blog moms, Megan @ The Adventure Starts Here and Elizabeth @ Chasin' Mason.  We totally got our "craft on" for this blog exchange and tried something pretty ambitious that we'd never done before - making tissue paper suncatchers!

I thought this would be such a great craft for a toddler to help out with.  In theory, I guess it was, but in execution, I was SO wrong.  I am seriously out of my mind sometimes when I think that my 2.5 year old will sit, pay attention and help for more than 7 seconds.  Within three minutes of me getting the stuff out to make these, I knew I was probably just going to end up with a huge mess, a glue-covered kid and tissue paper everywhere.  Unfortunately, I was right.

Step 1: Cut out two hearts from white paper.  Place them on a flat surface under some wax paper. Use tape to hold the wax paper down.  Try not to let the toddler pull miles of tape off the roll and cover himself, the table and the dogs with tape.  

 Step 2: Apply glue (or Mod Podge) to the wax paper over top of the heart.  Try not to let the toddler eat the glue, stick his entire hand in it or dump it out all over the table.  

Step 3: Place small pieces of tissue paper on the glue on the wax paper in any random order you want to completely cover the heart. Beware, tissue paper will not only stick to the glue on the wax paper, but it will stick even better to the glue on your toddler's fingers and then be impossible for them to get off, resulting in lots of shaking, rubbing on pant legs and carpet.

Step 5: Distract your toddler with candy or screen time to keep them completely away from the project while you pour yourself a giant glass of wine and spend the next two hours cutting, gluing and making a ridiculous mess in the living room and cursing yourself for trying to be a Pinterest perfect mom and consider throwing all this crap in the trash can. 

Step 6: Place another piece of wax paper on top of the heart and cover with a heavy book (finally found a good use for those old law school textbooks!) and let dry overnight (or a week, whatever). 

Step 7: Once dry, peel the top layer of wax paper off and use your heart-shaped paper template to cut out a heart.

Step 8: Apply a paper border to the heart (optional) and a string to hang in the window.

Step 9: Hang and enjoy!

Of course, everyone else went above and beyond with their Valentine's too. I was so impressed with all the great ideas that everyone had.  Stickers, puzzles, chocolate, popcorn...Mac is such a spoiled kid with these awesome blogger exchanges.  He's going to come to expect some seriously amazing swag for every holiday.  

Make sure you check out all the other moms and kids participating in the exchange.  A big thanks to Megan and Elizabeth for organizing and including us!  We had so much fun with it! 

 Meghan & Noah @ The Adventure Starts Here

Elizabeth & Mason @ Chasin' Mason 

Tawnya & Scarlett @ All of Life's Little Adventures

Ashley & Waverly @ Words About Waverly

Megan & Olivia @ Willow Way

Sara, Mac & Mim @ Running from the Law

Laureen, Tyson & Harper @ Chateau Deveau

Tara, Declan & Calem @ A Tale of Four Maples