Sweets for my Sweeties

My family LOVES chocolate and Valentine's Day gives us an excuse to splurge! After school we made some sweet treats to share with the ones we love.

Chocolate Kissed Pretzels

Ingredients:

Pretzels (I like to use the waffle ones because I think that they hold the kiss better)

M&M's

Hershey Kisses

Preheat oven to 275 degrees. Layer pretzels on baking sheet. Top each pretzel with an unwrapped Hershey Kiss and bake for 3 minutes.

Remove from oven and top with M&M. Gently push down M&M. Let chocolate harden. Store in sealed container.

Next, we made peanut butter cookies topped with Dove Milk Chocolate Hearts. I love opening the candies and reading the sweet messages inside Here are some of my favorites

** Remember your first crush

**Share a sunset

**Get Swept away by love

**Express what's in your heart

**Share a secret

Next on our sweet treat list was cupcakes. I have two of the BEST mixers around.

String of Hearts

After the "tic-tac-hearts" I had some felt left over so I decided to make some heart garland. This was very simple and quick to make.

Materials:

Red and Pink felt

pom poms

needle and thread

sewing maching

Start by cutting the felt into three inch pieces.

Place two pieces on top of one another, lining edges up. Sew pieces together lengthwise.

After sewing the first line, flip the fabric inside out and sew another line.

This will form one long tubular heart. Next Cut the pieces to the desired length. I cut mine about 3/4 of an inch wide.

I did this with both pink and red felt. The boys are always noticing patterns in things, so I let them practice making patterns while assembling the garland. They alternated hearts and pom poms.

Family Hearts

February is just a couple of days away, so it's time to start on my Valentine's crafts. Okay I probably should have started a few weeks ago so that I could actually enjoy some of the decorations that I want to make, but I am going to give it my best shot over the next few days. As a kid Conversation Heart Candies were a staple to every Valentine's Day. I never really liked them, but I always liked to read them. Now they put all different sayings on them. At the store the other day I was looking at the Valentine candy and discovered that Brach's makes Ice cream Flavored Conversation Hearts. I decided that I was going to give them a try. Here are a few of my favorite sayings.

The new Ice Cream flavors did not impress me, but the candy did inspire today's creation.

Materials Needed

Wooden Hearts

4-6 Different Pastel Paint Colors

Staple Gun

Paint Brush

48" of 1.5" wide ribbon

Letter Stickers

The hearts had barcode stickers on them so I had to use a combination of a razor blade and Goo Gone to get the adhesive off. To make sure that I covered up the slight color that the Goo Gone gave, I had to paint each of the hearts with 3 coats of paint.

After the paint is dry, arrange the name letters on the hearts. To attempt to get the names centered and straight, I started with the middle letter of the name and placed it in the center of the heart. I then placed the letters on either side and so on until all letters were on the heart.

Next I spaced the hearts on the ribbon. The dots on the ribbon helped me to space them equally apart with out having to measure it. I used the staple gun to attach them in place.

I next attached an 8 inch piece on the top heart to form a loop to use as a hanger.

This SUPER CUTE decoration will hang in our house year after year!

Googly Eye Valentine's Cards

Since I'm crafty, i figured why bother buying my kids Valentine's Cards for their class this year, i will just make them. I searched pinterest for cute ideas and came across ones that had glasses on them and then you stuck google eyes from the craft store on the lenses and it said "I have my eyes on you." They were darling but the person was charging like $6 for the digital design. I also liked some others I saw with Valentine's jokes on them and I know how much kids like jokes- so I thought I'd design my own and incorporate the two themes. Even better, I'll put the jpeg up here so you can just right click, save it as a picture, then print out and attach the googly eyes yourself!

I didn't want them all to have the same joke, so i made 4 versions. Here are the files-  (without the eyes of course).