Creating a Family Love Tree for Valentine's Day

Hi guys, please excuse the cheesy title. This was a hard one to come up with, and "family heart tree" sounds just as silly, so might as well go cheesy or go home I guess. I don't know guys, I'm kinda just winging it here.

In the spirit of trying to decorate for each holiday, even a little bit, I decided that I wanted to have a tree of sorts that expressed our family. I had a bunch of salt dough hearts leftover from the magnets that I made, and really didn't need another two dozen magnets so I thought these would work perfectly for the tree (these were the ones that I put string holes into before baking).

I choose most of the small hearts, a few medium hearts and two large hearts. Then I painted them various shades of pink and one heart I painted gold.  I used plain old acrylic paint for this, but I can't tell you the colours because I mixed them all except the gold. And using my handy-dandy paint pens (if you can't tell already I love these things) I added initials and dates to some of the hearts. Once I was happy with how they looked I did a coat of Mod Podge on both sides and used fishing line to hang them up.

(You can see my Valentine's day shelf above)

I used the large hearts for Luis and I's initials, the medium hearts are the kids initials and birth years. The one gold heart is the year that we got married, which was another medium heart. And the smallest hearts are the animals initials, because they are a part of our family too. There are a few hearts without anything on them too, just to balance the tree and make it not so busy.

Ideally I would have liked the branches to be a little fuller but these were off of our rose of Sharon bush in the backyard because we have no other trees with small branches around. They worked great and were the perfect size, I also used fishing line to attach these together in the vase.

Can you imagine having your kids help you paint these hearts and add things that they love to it? This is a great family craft to do together so that you can teach your kids that Valentine's Day (even though it's commercialized) is about love, not candy and valentines.

You don't even need to use salt dough for the hearts, you could use clay from a craft store or even card stock. This is as easy as you want to make it. This would also be great for a thankful tree around Thanksgiving using things that the kids are thankful for on leaves.

I can't wait to add to our tree as the kids get older and can add their own things to it, even if they are silly. Right now it just shows off special dates and initials of some very important people in this house.

That's it for today guys, come back soon and check out what else is new and what I'm actually getting accomplished. If you guys do make these I'd love to see them.

Kerby  

Linking to:
Two Chicks and a Mom - Funtastic Friday #113  
Ginger Snap Crafts - Wow Me Wednesday #286