DLTK's Holiday Activities
Valentine's Day Wreath Craft

This craft is fun for older children (and adults!) - Age 6+.  There are quite a few steps that younger kids (Age 2+) can help with, but they won't be able to do the craft independently.  This is a good family project!

Materials:

• Optional:  Valentine's color paint like pink, purple or red
• Wire coat hanger
• 14 to 16 tp rolls
• red, pink and/or white construction paper (you could also use craft foam or white paper painted or colored
• tape,
• glue,
• scissors

Instructions:

• ADULT:  Take each tp roll and cut a slit HALFWAY through.
• Optional:  Paint tp rolls a valentine's day color.  You can see from the finished craft that not much shows through, but my kids have fun painting, so we painted them all shades of pink and purple.
• Let dry.
• ADULT:  Bend the coat hanger to form a circle.
• Using the slits cut halfway through the rolls, slide each of your tp rolls onto the hanger to form a big circle of tp rolls.
• Optional:  Take a bit of masking or scotch tape and tape the tp rolls together.  (tape the openings of the tp rolls on the inside of the circle together).  This will keep the rolls from spinning around while you're working.  If you chose not to do this, the paper hearts will keep everything from spinning on the finished craft.
• Cut out many, many heart shapes.  Show children how to fold construction paper in half to make a symmetrical heart:
   
  • Fold a piece of construction paper in half or in 1/4s (for young crafters, folding in half is challenging enough -- more experienced crafters can fold 3 or 4 times to make hearts in "bulk").
  • Cut a half heart shape out of the construction paper along the folded edge.
  • Unfold your cut out shape and you'll have a perfect little heart.
• One person can be doing this part while another is assembling the tp roll wreath base.  This works well if you have crafters of different ages (the base is more difficult than cutting out hearts).

• We made sets of fancy hearts by gluing hearts inside each other -- a large heart, medium heart, small heart and very small heart of varying colors were stacked and glued.  Then we scattered around some small single hearts to fill in gaps
• Tie a bow on the top if you want to.

Printable version of these instructions