Heart Trees

 

Today I thought we’d try to liven things up a bit at our house with a Valentine’s Day art project. Heart trees. They looked so cute and unassuming on Pinterest, but they turned out to be a lot more involved than I’d originally thought. Does this ever happen to you? You get smack in the middle of an activity with your kids before you realize that you bit off a little more than you bargained for. Haha! Oh well, pressing forward…

 

The hand print tree-trunk part went fine. We’ve done that before.

 

 

But making the hearts got tricky. I thought the boys (ages 6 and 4) would be able to do the hearts by themselves, but since the paper strips were pretty small, it took a lot more coordination, and I ended up making most of the hearts (my 6 year old did some, but lost interest after about 8 hearts) and just having the kids glue them on. First, you have to do kind of a funky, twisty thing with the paper to get the staple in the right place.

Then you have to squish the bottom of the heart into a point.

 

Once you have a bunch of hearts, you can glue them into place fairly easily. And the trees do turn out super cute when they’re finished. Maybe a good solution would be to just have longer paper strips (and therefore bigger hearts), and that way the kids could do it all on their own. Either way, we finished the project. It took longer than I wanted it to, but it was still festive and fun. And now we have some great Valentines décor hanging up for all to see.