Kids Craft: Valentine Mice Kisses Envelope Card

The nine year old has not been a big fan of cliched cards and candy fad for Valentine's day; her class does a simple card exchange with an optional candy element keeping in mind allergies and sugar content. Participation in card-exchange is optional as well, and handmade cards are encouraged.

Pretty much every year so far, she has been making custom valentine cards for her friends, and this year she still seemed interested, so we brainstormed together.

To candy or not? That was the question.

The candy mice made of Hershey's™  Kisses was an instant favorite the minute she came across it on web search and that settled the issue of candy this year.

We cut out little pink hearts to serve as the mice ears which was sandwiched between two Kisses and glued with rubber cement. The eyes were the most fun to do - spacing them, mismatching them, all seemed to add character to each mouse.

For a while now, she has been playing around with Picmonkey, so it was fun to create a simple card with the timeless message: "Make new friends, but keep the old; one is silver and the other's gold." She didn't want to make any standard one-liner jokes or cloying sweet messages that play on word sounds.

How best to package this card? was another question. Should it be just a small postcard-style card with message on one side and name on the other like previous years? Nah, that seemed too blasé.

That's how we hit upon Envelope Card: make a template square to fit the card, with appropriate shaping on all four sides to fold in and make it envelop the card.

We also made some labels to add the From and To at the front using Picmonkey. Since there were about two dozen envelope cards to make, I helped her make some of them and we both had fun creating these simple no-fuss unique cards for her friends.

All that was left to do was hot glue the mice to the card and hand this unique and thoughtful token to her friends in class.