Kids Craft: Hearts Window Decorations

Valentine's Day for Ana has come to represent a day of friendship, a day to share something nice, something special, with friends. And family.

Hearts - pink, red and some purple - seem to excite her. And boy does she love glitter. Pink glitter is the top favorite, naturally.

Anyway, Ana was planning a party for Enid paapaa (her cabbage patch doll). Planning it all day Saturday as the party was to be held on Sunday. She cut strips of paper and glued them into ring-chains as decorations for the party.

And she wanted to add some window decoration as well. So, keeping the approaching Valentine's Day in mind, I suggested a simple hearts decoration she could do and use it for Enid's party, and then leave it on till Valentine's Day.

Items Used: Clear contact sheet, tissue papers of various colors, scissors, glitter, heart template (or just draw freehand)

1. Fold the tissue paper multiple times to a comfortable size, draw a heart template (varying sizes for different colors if preferred), and allow the child to cut along the lines to make "a bunch of hearts", as the resident scissor-hands likes to call it, in one go
2. Peel away the backing and weigh down the corners of a desired area of the clear contact sheet (about 8-inch wide), making sure there is as much unpeeled contact sheet left to fold over
3. Start arranging the tissue paper hearts on the sticky contact sheet, covering as much as the heart desires
4. Sprinkle glitter - pink, silver, red - or any other
5. Carefully peel back some more backing and fold over the clear contact sheet thus trapping the tissue hearts and glitter in between, like laminating
6. Press and smooth down and trim to a largish - we made an approximately 18-inch by 16-inch - rectangle that showcases the tissue hearts and glitter
7. Cut them into long wavy strips; attach a piece of tape and decorate the window; or thread a needle and attach a string loop at the top and hang from any favorite hook
8. Instead of cutting into wavy strips for decoration, can cut heart shapes again and make Valentine Cards
9. Or, showcase the hearts much like melted crayon stained glass - make a heart-shaped cut-out in a greeting card (I love X-Acto Knife™!) and glue a piece of this laminated tissue hearts to show through the heart-window cut-out

Seeing Ana work with tissue paper and heart shapes, Oggie seemed mildly interested. So, he got to do the usual découpage-inspired craft that Ana liked to do at that age - viz., a cardstock paper with generous sticky glue applied, with a few pieces of squares and circles of tissue papers ready to stick on.



Oggie's heart wasn't in it, but, he was curious about the stickiness and the texture of the tissue paper. Once he was "done" with it, I just cut out heart-shapes just for keepsake, or maybe he can give them to his friends next week...