154) Contact Paper and Glitter Valentines

I have a serious love of all art materials, I may even be a little bit obsessed with art materials. There is, however, one art material that I really don't like (and I know I am not alone here) it's glitter. Of course, glitter is hands down the Bee and Beans most favorite material of all time. They would, if given the chance, add glitter to everything they make. A few weeks ago when we first started thinking valentines, I thought it might be cool to make some valentines contact paper collages and then cut them up and put them in the window of a card. We had some blank cards meant to hold a photo left over from a few years ago that I thought we could use for this project. To get us started I laid out two large sheets of clear contact paper and taped them sticky side up to the table.

I then cut a bunch of hearts from our painted papers and placed them in the center of the table. My thought was that each of the girls would make a collage and we would then sandwich the two pieces of contact paper together for the front of the cards. The girls sat down and started working on the collage while I went to the other room to grab some valentines doilies. I can honestly say I was gone no more then 45 seconds, yet in that 45 seconds the Bean managed to find, open and dump out almost an entire jar of glitter! At first I was astonished, then mad, then I tried to contain my anger and explain that we don't pour out glitter, then I realized that amazingly she had poured most of the glitter directly onto the contact paper. The glitter actually stuck beautifully to the contact paper, so we did the only thing we really could do, we went with it. When life gives you glitter, make Valentine's. The girls finished collaging the other piece of contact paper with all their hearts. Then when they were finished we sandwiched the two pieces of contact paper together, sticky side to sticky side.

Next I cut out pieces of the contact paper large enough to fit into the window of our blank cards. If you didn't have these kind of cards you could easily cut a window from a piece of card stock or paper. We then slid the contact paper into the window to make some beautifully glittery valentines. We only had a few of these cards so we made these valentines for some of our friends and family.