Tree of Love for Valentine's

I came across a number of Valentine's Day crafts on Pinterest. A's school got the kids to make a heart out of air drying clay and painted it red. They sent it home to us, after placing a tea light holder in the centre of the heart. 

Though back home, I had never seen anyone involve kids in a Valentine's day celebration; the school's involvement here made me hunt for some crafts. I have a friend in the US, whose 2 sons had to each make 30 valentine day cards for their school mates and some more for their teachers as well. My friend, who chose to make the cards at home, instead of simply buying them from the store, swore that this was her first and last time at it! ;-)

So I thought, why not, let me give it a shot too - at least, I had no such commitments at school, so we made it a home project. I looked up a number of crafts and the 'Valentine Tree' interested me. Though what I saw was a miniature craft, a thin branch of twigs arranged in a small pot and hung with decorations, I ended up making just something else altogether! I wanted to use the tissue paper rolls which we had begun to save up, by default - just in case, a craft caught our fancy! So I set about making my tree from scratch.

I picked up 2 kitchen tissue rolls that are almost double the length of the standard toilet tissue rolls and fixed one on top of another vertically to make the trunk. I then cut a dozen regular tissue rolls to flatten them up. I asked A to colour all of them dark brown with water colours. Once they were dry, A and I drew bold branch shapes on them and I later cut them out. I stuck the branches on either side of the tree trunk so that it resembled a tree. I tried making bark shapes on them with crayons and chalk pastels. This is how the first cut looked -

 

I wanted to jazz it up a bit, but couldn't think of anything, so this is how our tree looked for almost 3-4 days. And then, as I was punching coloured paper one day for some other craft, I had an idea. I picked up 2-3 different green coloured sheets and punched them quite a bit and stuck all the green dots randomly on the tree. I liked the look, here it is - 

For the hearts, I picked up another recycling idea; you would probably laugh if i tell you this! I cut out hearts from plastic milk cartons! Hahaha!! I got this idea from a mommy online who made suncatchers with these - they did not seem like a very bad idea. A and I got to work with doing patterns and decorations on the hearts. We used everything and anything from buttons to felt to foam to beads to stars to even paper! A glimpse - 

All the decorations were done by A with glitter glue and regular glue. I just did the cutting work wherever required! We took about 2 days to dry all our crafts and when they were ready, I punched a hope at the top middle of the hearts and drew red satin strings through them. When everything was ready, we put up the hearts on the tree and the decoration was done!

This is our tree of love - 'Appa, Amma and Me' :-) We presented this to Appa when he came home tired on Valentines' day evening - as expected, it was perfect to brighten up his evening! :-) Followed by a special dinner too! Heart shaped pasta! Yay! :-)

Happy Valentines'..... always! :-)