Recycled Art Project: Making Valentines Day Cards

We love finding creative ways to reuse or recycle things we might normally just throw away.

Today we made Valentine's Day cards with cardboard toilet paper rolls and plastic water bottles!

Cardboard Toilet Paper Tube Hearts

To make these heart stamps, just bend the cardboard tube into a heart shape and dunk it in some paint.

Then you simply stamp the heart on to your card.  Rachel was so excited to see the heart she had made!

She then went about painting the insides of the hearts and decorating the rest of the card.  Notice how she got so into this that she had a paint brush in each hand!

But preschoolers dance to their own drum so at some point she decided the card would look better if she painted the whole thing blue.  She even said, "cool" as I took the second picture here.

I let her creativity go and next thing I knew all of the hearts were almost unrecognizable.  I asked her, "What happened to the red hearts for Valentine's Day?  Why is the card all green and yellow now?"   

Rachel simply smiled at me and said, "Don't worry.  You just have to trust a TRUE artist.  All the beauty is still there." 

Nicholas got creative and made two-tone hearts!

Water Bottle Flower Stamp

We used the bottom of a water bottle to make some cool flower stamps.  Just dip the bottom of the bottle in some paint.

Then stamp the bottle on the card.

Fill in the rest of the flower with markers or paint.

Once the red flowers were dry, Nicholas decided to make a second stamp of pink paint over them.  I think it turned out really cool looking.

Of course, while Nicholas was making his card, Rachel continued to play with her paint until it looked like this....

I guess it was an hands-on lesson in color blending!

She did make more heart stamped cards.  She wrote in them on her own too.  (She likes to write in all caps!)