Valentines Made by Artists

The girls are less interested in prepping for Valentine's Day than they are in it just BEING Valentine's Day already, but nevertheless, even children have obligations, and Valentine's Day likely incurs the greatest obligations for the under-12 set than any other holiday.

Y'all, we have GOT to make some Valentines.

The girls' school does permit store-bought Valentines, although not Valentines with media characters, so I'm not sure how you're supposed to work that one, but I'll be damned if I'm going to spend a penny on this Hallmark holiday when we are perfectly capable of constructing our own Valentines with stuff we already own, and stuff that is, thus, free.

Therefore the daily sweatshop. Which is also really not that bad because the children are also not asked to bring a Valentine for everyone in their class, but just their special friends. To keep even that lesser amount from getting monotonous, I set out a different Valentine activity every day, so that there's a little more impetus to keep crafting, and no, they are NOT allowed to make every single Valentine be for their mutual friend Ella.

The day before yesterday, the girls made one tray of melted crayon hearts, which is three hearts for each of them to give out. Yesterday was far more productive, with the creation of Artist Trading Card Valentines being fun enough for the girls to make about a dozen total:Willow did most of hers with colored pencil, but Sydney got really into coloring her ATC, then gluing beads onto it:
I found that fun, too:

I got into the habit last year of giving out Artist Trading Cards instead of business cards at craft fairs (I always prefer performing a labor-intensive task over spending any kind of money whatsoever), so if there are any Valentines left unsent, I will be happy to have them join the Pumpkin+Bear ATC stash.

For today's Valentines, I'm thinking of setting out this huge stash of plastic "stained glass" suncatchers and paint that my mother bought for the girls the last time we visited. The girls can have the fun of painting them, and then they can leave my house and be someone else's chore to hang up and display and surreptitiously get rid of when the kids aren't looking.

ATC Swapped

My first grown-up ATC swap (can you believe that Will did an ATC swap before I did?) was pretty much super-fun, as I'm sure you can imagine.

Here's my X card, entitled "Mac's X-Ray":
This didn't photograph well, but it's an x-ray image of a brain tumor that my Mac (different from my Matt--rumor has it that Papa, who is hard of hearing and before my marriage saw me with my best friend as much as he saw me with my boyfriend, combined with the fact that Mac, my best man, wore a tux that was carelessly identical to Matt's, never was quite sure exactly which guy I was marrying until the actual marriage. Gawd, how I love all three of those dumb guys) battled a few years ago, printed onto transparency film and stitched to Bristol board. The words were printed individually onto adhesive paper and adhered to the front of the transparency (I'm afraid they're going to fall off, though--next time, I should figure out how to attach them from the other side of the transparency?)

Here's the X ATC of one of my swap partners. It's entitled "X-Ray":
It's three ATCs that accordion together using those metal rings, which is awesome cool. The images are x-rays printed onto matte paper and then glued onto the ATC paper.

Here's another X, by a different swap partner. It's entitled "Xenograft:"

The top and bottom of the figure are individually cut out and glued together--the proportions are perfect, which amazes me. The background is stamped with lots of letter x, and the postage stamps carry the letter, too.

Here's the V card from a swap partner--it's entitled "V=Villain":

There are a ton of collage elements to notice here--photos, typing, black-and-white copy images, inked parts, parts shaded in with colored pencil, etc.

Here's my W card, entitled "My Little Willow Tree:"

It's cotton quilting fabric quilted to Bristol board, then embroidered using the free-hand tool on my sewing machine with a willow tree.

And here's my V card, entitled "Aunt Vicki":

Again, the photo is lousy, because it's really hard to photograph a transparency. This is a photo of my Aunt Vicki printed onto a vintage book page (The Christmas Carol, I believe), lined up exactly with an identical photo printed on an overhead transparency--they're all quilted to Bristol board with a double row of stitching. The words are again printed individually on sticker paper and adhered to the top, and I'm betting they fall off before the year is out.

I think it takes a year to do all the swaps to equal an entire alphabet--how cool would that be?

Oh, no--I am now also obsessed with alphabets.

We are Officially Artists, and We Have the Cards to Prove It

After many, many mornings of creative labor----Willow's ATC Kids' Swap is wrapped up and ready to mail: Watercolor remained a big hit, as did acrylics----but for all the tiny little detail work of the tiny little trading cards, I think that Willow found herself much more satisfied, in the end, with colored pencils. She's gotten pretty representative in her work lately----and only with pencils, probably, could you create an ATC that deserves a caption like this: I think we all found the ATC experience quite inspiring--Will freely calls herself an artist (She has the proof--they are ARTIST trading cards, aren't they?), Matt rediscovered Bristol board as a canvas for the comics he draws, and I'm thinking about organizing a Kids' ATC Swap on Craftster and about using ATCs as my business cards instead of my Moo cards this coming craft fair season (Moo cards are unbeatable, but can get pricey, and shipping from the UK? I can hardly justify it).

In other news, I actually got one of my kids to wash the other kid's hair today:

If these kids didn't need me to constantly pay them so much flippin' attention, my days would be just about made.