Quick Valentines

Valentine's Day has come and gone - I know.  I wanted to share our valentines, though.  I was in the midst of all the auction work and just assumed my children would want to buy their valentines.  Was I ever wrong!  So I came up with a good solution that didn't take too much of my time and that we could make a bunch of with relative ease.  Notebooks!

To start, I cut a piece of 8.5" x 11" paper into quarters and gave two to each of the girls.  They each drew a front cover for their notebook and Kate drew a back cover, too.  I then scanned their art work into the computer and set up a document so that all four designs could print on one page.  Does that make sense?  Kate's artwork was on two quarters and Jane's was on one.  The fourth quarter was left blank because Jane wanted her back cover plain.  Once I was happy with the set up, I printed it out 25 times on card stock.

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I took the card stock to FedEx Kinko's and asked them to cut the paper into fourths.  I could have done this part at home, but I really wanted the cuts to be clean and even.  I also bought a ream of copy paper and had them cut that into fourths, too.   All said and done, it cost about $7.  I took everything home and assembled notebook sandwiches - front cover, about 15 pages copy paper, back cover.  Using a zig zag stitch on my machine, I sewed up one side of each notebook.  The girls made name tags for their classmates and we were pretty much done.  We put a pencil with each notebook which made for a perfect ensemble!

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I think from start to finish (drawing time not included!), it took me about 2 hours.  Not bad and certainly inexpensive.  I had another parent tell me that they took theirs to a restaurant that night and his son used it to keep busy while waiting for dinner.  Perfect.  We have lots of copy paper left over so I am sure we will make these again just because.  I think they would be great party favors, too.

All right, back tomorrow.  Yellow week got me on a blogging roll.  And yes, it was about time.

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