a valentine from baby....

this was such a fun little valentine project - a gift from lucy to her daddy. it cracks me up when i look at it, though. lucy had just turned one, and i had her in a diaper on some newspaper on the kitchen floor fingerpainting!  so far my second little imp, ruthie, has eaten a few markers, scribbled on the tile and wall with crayons and used an open stamp pad as a pretend cell phone. i will NOT be giving her free reign with the paint box any time soon.

anyway, this was easy & cheap and still looks cute on our playroom wall. i had found some old album frames gathering dust under the bed. i removed a willie nelson record cover from one of them and decided to put it to use again. (the square scrapbook frames now available at hobby lobby and michael's would work even better, however.)

i put lucy on some newspaper and gave her a paper plate filled with globs of primary, washable fingerpaint. by the time it was over, she had happily painted on several sheets of white fingerpaint paper (any paper would work), on her diaper, her hair, on the newspaper, on the tile and a little on the cabinets. i of course took about 325 photos.

i took a sheet of red & white gingham scrapbook paper and chose a colorful portion of one of lucy's paintings. i tore it to fit onto the scrapbook sheet without covering all of it, and pasted it on. i made a small print of one of the photos from the paint session, matted it, and pasted it to the scrapbook page. i added a couple little accessories i had in my scrapbook cabinet, then stamped some hearts and "daddy be mine" across the bottom. i used craft paint for the stamping instead of an ink pad, so the letters would adhere to the photo & shiny paper. i wrote the occasion and year along the side, and wrapped it up for valentine's day. i used another one of the frames for a father's day gift a few months later. i framed lucy's little hand print (pictured above), then added an overlay that said, "my finger may be small, but i can still wrap daddy's finger around it" (there are tons of choices at hobby lobby & michael's!) i decided to come up with something different for the next gifting occasion -there's only so much space on our playroom walls...

i cut the remaining paintings into smaller rectangles, used pinking shears to cut out more small pix of lucy, and created valentine's cards for friends and family. a few years later, they continue to adorn fridge fronts in texas and oklahoma. i love how the simplest of gifts can be everlasting symbols of love.