valentine's day tricks

♥ pretzel valentines ♥ paint strip valentines ♥ sidewalk valentines ♥

Anything I post here for Valentine's Day is probably going to be donut related, so as I sit here totally wrecked with the flu, I thought I'd dredge up my favorite little valentines from years past. All three of these were poorly lit and photographed by yours truly with a phone, but they were fun nonetheless.  

The pretzel valentines were born of love; David adores soft pretzels and we adore him. The kids love to make these. We've been doing it for ages, but this time around we used food coloring to dye the sesame seeds and rock salt pink. You can find the full project here.

The paint strip valentines were an epiphany, until I later realized everyone and their mother crafts with paint chips and strips. C'est la vie! We live a half a block from a paint shop so the materials were easy to come by. They were super cute, and were featured at Benjamin Moore's Color Chats blog. You can find the full tutorial here.

The sidewalk valentines were something we did way before I started this blog. We used to walk several blocks after getting off the bus on the way to Stella's preschool, back in the day. We noticed a few dozen hearts drawn in the concrete along that walk, so that year on Valentine's Day we packed a case of red, pink and rose colored chalk, left early for school, and colored our way down and up about six blocks. So sweet and fun! It rained later that day, so on the way home we just saw smudges of color where there had once been perfect hearts. I loved this one, you can see more photos here.