Make a Valentine Mailbox
Do you remember Valentine’s Day in grade school? It wasn’t about finding a date at an exclusive restaurant or figuring out the perfect gift for someone special - it was all about getting excited when someone attached candy to their class Valentine cards and checking out who had the coolest Valentine mailbox. Last year, at my daughter’s old school, they didn’t hand out Valentines. I never quite figured out why, but we just crafted cards to give to family members instead. This year, she’s at a new school and they’re having a full-on party, so when my daughter brought home the Valentine list paper that also said “mailboxes may be decorated if desired,” there was no question. Of course it was getting decorated!
Off I went to the craft store to find a Valentine box. Don’t get me wrong here, I’m a big fan of saving money and reusing materials, so I searched for a shoe box at the house first. We haven’t bought shoes in a long time though, and the last shoe box we had ended up getting used to move a mole out of the dog’s space in the backyard a few months ago, but that’s a story for another day! Once I found the box at the store, I was looking through the decorating options they had available there. There were tons of ideas; there were foam stickers, paper cut-outs, and some really cute little craft kits that would make the box look like a unicorn or a robot. But my daughter and I really like our art to be unique - we don’t like matching everyone else (her exact words at one point were “I like to be different from my friends because it’s more fun!”). I didn’t want to chance her decorating a unicorn box and just to go into school and sit it down next to five other unicorn mailboxes, so I decided to go a different route than the available decor from the craft store.
The box I found at the craft store - very shoe-box-like and a nice, blank canvas for art adventures.
Could my child have sat down and colored on this box by herself, thus creating a wonderfully unique piece of artwork without my added steps that I’m about to show you? Yes, absolutely, and I’m sure it would have looked great. However, my child gets her perfectionist tendencies from her mother (and I will spend many of her teen and adult years apologizing for that, I’m sure). I knew that if she drew something but then didn’t like the outcome, she would be heartbroken about her box and she wouldn’t want to take it into school. My solution? Stickers!
I went onto Canva and found outlines of various Valentine designs. This doesn’t have to be done on Canva, you can find things on any image search. You could even draw them yourself! For my idea, I searched “Valentine outline” and came across hundreds of designs that looked like they were made for coloring books. Once we had a few pages of designs, I stuck my sticker paper in the printer and hit print. If you don’t have sticker paper, just print your designs on regular paper and grab a glue stick to use instead!
Once things were printed, it was time for the fun part - the coloring! My daughter grabbed some coloring-coordinated crayons, which was an impressive forethought in my opinion. I would have just been using the whole box, but she clearly had an idea in mind. As she was coloring, I was cutting out the stickers for her. She could have done it herself, but I wanted to be involved and it was a nice time-saver too. Yes, I do have a Cricut and I know there’s a way to “print then cut” on that software, but I wasn’t trying to take the time to figure that out. (Fellow crafters, you can comment all your suggestions on making Cricut stickers because I do want to try it out!)
My daughter sat with her mailbox and all her colorful stickers making a plan in her head for all of ten seconds before she started sticking things everywhere. Any available white surface got a sticker, even the inside. She wasn’t a fan of my idea to let the stickers overlap though; each sticker had to have it’s own section. But check out the final result - I think it looks amazing!
I also gave her some store-bought glitter stickers to add on afterwards because I know my kid and she absolutely adores glitter. There was no way there couldn’t be glitter on her Valentine mailbox somewhere. And now she’s got a completely unique box that she crafted herself to take into school. She’s super proud of it! She has since written out all the Valentine cards for her class (while asking if she really, truly had to do it for everyone and was I totally sure about that?) and she stuck them all in there so now all that’s left to do is not forget to take the box to school on Wednesday. And that, my friends, is the trickiest part of this whole endeavor, so wish us luck!
