Valentines Popsicle Flowers

Valentine’s Day is coming up next week. We’ve never really celebrated it romantically, as a couple, but I love how the Finnish celebrate it as a day of friendship. This is the first year that Oskar has really understood properly what Valentine’s Day is, and he wanted to make some Valentines for his friends at school.

So we repurposed an idea from his nursery a couple of years ago, where the kids had made Mother’s Day ‘flowers’ with cut-outs of their handprints stuck on to ice lolly, or popsicle, sticks. I thought replacing the handprints with hearts would make this a perfect Valentine, and a nice alternative to traditional cards.

Here’s what you’ll need:

• A couple sheets of paper in red and pink tones
• A sheet of green paper
• Some ice lolly, or popsicle sticks (a good excuse to eat some ice lollies first, or you can buy packs of them in craft shops)
• A glue stick
• A pair of scissors
• A black coloured pencil
• Some coloured pens (or more coloured pencils)

Step 1: Cut out some heart shapes from the red and pink paper. The easiest way to do this, to get perfectly symmetrical hearts, is to fold some paper in half, then cut out half a heart shape (see above). Ours are aprox. 7.5cm high along the fold.

Step 2: Cut out some small leaves from the green paper, two per ‘flower’. These ones are aprox. 3.5cm long. I just freehanded them.

Step 3: With the black coloured pencil, write ‘Happy Valentines’ on one side of the ice lolly, or popsicle, sticks, leaving aprox. 3.5cm blank at one end. I found that using pen, the ink bled in to the wood, so that’s why we used pencil for this.

Step 4: Get your kids to decorate the hearts. Here’s Oskar just about to make one for his teacher. Mr Fox refused to participate, lol.

Here are Oskar’s finished hearts – I love that he wanted to make some for both girls and boys in his class!

Step 5: Stick the hearts to ends of the ice lolly, or popsicle, sticks that you left blank, then stick a leaf either side. Oskar also decided he wanted to write ‘from Oskar’ on the leaves – if you want to do this (obviously not Oskar, but whatever your name is, haha) then it’s best to do this *before* sticking on the leaves.

And there we go – finished! Easy-peasy and unique Valentines greetings to hand out to all your loved ones. If you make any of these, I would love to see some photos. You can tag me on Twitterin or Instagram.