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Vintage Valentines

It's been a minute since I've posted, so I have some catch-up posts to write, but first I wanted to write about today's Valentine event at the Denver Museum of Miniatures, Dolls and Toys.  Today was a "Get Craft-Tea" event where we had tea, Valentine's treats, and made a craft: doll-sized vintage valentines.  In addition, we had a photo booth where people could get photos with their dolls, and I even made a photo frame for the event. 

I knew I wanted to do a doll-sized vintage valentines craft, so I searched for regular ol' vintage valentines, and quickly found Cleverly Simple's full-size vintage valentine craft.  She suggests Vintage Holiday Crafts as a source for printable vintage valentines, but I also found a bunch on Clipart Library and The Graphics Fairy.  Do note the terms of use and image limitations from each source.

Once I had images and an idea, I scaled everything down to doll size (a range of doll sizes, actually) and we printed them out on vintage-looking paper.  We also found loads of ribbon, lace, buttons, sequins, jewels, paper, and other goodies for putting together doll-sized valentines.


(And here's the difference between kids and adults: A few months back I did a backdrops workshop that was mostly adults.  Like this one, it was a fairly open-ended workshop of "make the backdrop you want," but the adults asked for examples and direction.  Today's workshop was mostly kids with parents or grandparents, and although I had an example ready, the kids dove right in with zero instruction and little interest in my example.  Kids are born crafters and we could all use a little of that confidence and freedom of expression!)

Because Sweethearts conversation hearts are a Valentine's Day staple, I included human-sized boxes of the candies with our assortment of treats, and I found doll-sized printable Sweethearts boxes that could be printed on cardstock or heavy paper, cut out, and glued together.  This craft is nostalgic and requires some dexterity, so I thought it would be the adults who did this one, but it was actually largely the kids who chose to put them together, so I spent some time helping little fingers with the many cuts and folds!


The photo booth was largely ignored until the very end, when suddenly I developed a line.  It was such a pretty setup and the pictures really turned out great!




Originally we were planning on doing a more grown-up event for our next doll event, but based on the popularity of this one and how many families said they would be watching for our next event, I'm thinking we need to do another kid-friendly craft in April!

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