Valentine’s Day is right around the corner and if you’re anything like myself, you are probably running around like crazy trying to find the perfect Valentine cards for your kids to hand outto their friends.Not to mention, trying to figure out what kind of box you will be crafting up for them to take to school. I will say that I love crafting and sometimes a kid project turns into a mommy project which is totally fine with my kids most of the time. This year I let my kids browse through Pinterest to gather some sort of idea or theme that they wanted to do for their Valentine’s boxes. My five year old quickly picked out a cute Pikachu box. My daughter picked out a princess box and my 8 year old chose a Fortnite llama. We took the general ideas we found and then created our own versions of said boxes. Below you will see a picture of each of the final products. I don’t have step by step instructions for any of them, but I will give you a general idea on how to create your own versions. Your best friend for these projects will be a hot glue gun and a bunch of empty Amazon boxes or other small boxes you may have lying around. Here goes…
Pikachu
The Pikachu box was probably the simplest. Unfortunately, with all the hot gluing needed, my five year old honestly didn’t get a whole lot of hands on helping with this one, but he was ecstatic about the final product so I’ll call that a win. First,I got a medium to small sized box about the size of a shoe box. Using scissors (a box cutter would have been ideal) I cut a slot at the top of the box for the Valentine Cards to be inserted into. I also cut a flap on the back big enough for my son to reach his hand into to pull out all the cards once it was full. I used a hot glue gun and sealed the rest of the box shut. Next, I covered the entire box in stiff yellow felt. I had to cut and glue pieces together to make it fit just right. It’s definitely not a seamless coverage, but once it’s all done it really doesn’t take anything away from the appearance. To make the ears stick up straight as seen in the picture, I glued a BBQ skewer stick to the back of each ear and hot glued it into a hole that I poked on top of Pikachu’s head. I also used black felt for the tips of the ears, and on the tail as well. I used the black felt to cut out the eyes and had some extra silver scrapbook paper lying around so those became the eyeballs. Red construction paper was used for the cheeks and just regular white paper was used to create a mouth. We had some left over glitter paper from my daughter’s box so my son decided that would make for a great party hat. He then glued on letters to spell his name on the front.
Fortnite Llama
This one was the most difficult by far but my 8 year old and I are both pretty pleased with the outcome. For this project, we needed a medium to small sized box for the body, a smaller rectangular box for the head, an even smaller box for the snout, and two toilet paper rolls to create the basic structure. First, we made the card slot on the main body of the llama and then created the side opening flap to be able to retrieve the cards from. Next,we pieced the body together using the hot glue gun. We tried taping, but the glue is what held it together the best. We cut the two toilet paper rolls in half and used those for the legs. We attached those to the medium sized box, then attached the slightly smaller box to the body to create the llama’s head.Then, we glued on the snout. We covered the entire body of the llama with purple construction paper including its legs. This is where my eight year old was really able to take over. We used the larger packing tape and that seemed to hold the construction paper on better. We also used BBQ skewers to hold up the ears of the llama and glued them onto the top of its head. Once the llama was completely covered in purple, my son cut strips of light blue, dark blue, and purple paper and then cut fringes along the bottom of all the pieces. He then layered them starting at the bottom of the llama and going up. My son used white paper to create the eyes and glued googly eyes into the middle of the white circles. We then used black felt and glued it across the llama’s back to create a saddle. To finish it off, my son used colorful scrapbook paper to add his name.
Princess Castle
This box was pretty easy to do and once the basic structure was completed, my daughter added some more pizazz to it. First,we took the smaller of the two boxes we had and cut the bottom out of it and cut a hole for the cards to go in on the opposite side. We placed this box on top of a slightly larger box, traced around the smaller box, and then cut out that piece of the bottom box so that when cards were put in the slot on top, they would fall all the way to the bottom of the larger box. I also cut a flap on the bottom side of the box for retrieving cards. I hot glued the top box to the bottom box and then covered the entirety of this box using blue glitter foam sheets. We then glued the four toilet paper rolls to the box and covered them in silver glitter paper. I cut out pieces of pink scrapbook paper and rolled them up to create the roofs for the castle towers. We added a door and my daughter decorated it with hearts and glitter balls. She also cut letters out for her name and glued those to the front of the box as well.
All these boxes were super fun to make and although they can look intimidating, you can do a lot with a glue gun and some cardboard. I hope these ideas have helped give some inspiration and encouragement on conquering this year’s Valentine’s Day boxes.
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