valentines & another give-away

First, I extend my thoughts and prayers to those who are affected by the bush fire situation in Victoria, Australia (many of your fellow blog-readers live there). I am saddened to hear about the tragedy of homes and lives lost and pray that families and communities will be strengthened through this trial.

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The winners of Candice's Valentines garland class are ... Jenny in Greifswald, Germany and Lisa in Honolulu, Hawaii! E-mail me, ladies, and I'll get you the code you'll need to register for the class. [ bhiggins@ckmedia.com ]

In case you need a Valentines idea, I thought I'd share something we're pulling together this week. These are for our kids to distribute to their respective classmates in school. They have been involved in the process and we're having fun doing the project together.



Started with some packages of some classic Sweethearts candies:



Then both kids did their own Valentines art on a plain sheet of 8 1/2" x 11" paper.

Porter's art:



Claire's art (I added the text in Photoshop after I scanned it in):



I scanned them in, and reduced their size to about 2" x 3". In a Pages document (that's like Word for Macs), I created a shape/box (like a text box), dropped the image in the middle, and duplicated this 2 more times on the page. This is what it looked like, ready to print:



After I printed the sheets, I trimmed along the borders to get the final sheets, all ready to wrap around each box:



The kids used a glue stick all over the front of each box, then we placed a wrapper on each one:



The final step, of course, is to wrap it around the box and adhere the wrapper to itself on the back of the box.

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Totally changing the topic, but keeping on a related note of GIVING to others ... my mom wants to GIVE someone the cross-stitch patterns (see the past couple posts). How cute is she!?

So here we go again. If you are interested in winning the angel or monthly pillow patterns, leave your first name & where you live and my MOM will randomly choose 2 of you to win. She just ordered the patterns for this purpose, so as soon as they arrive, she'll ship them to those 2 winners.

Yay for cute moms!