Gearing up for Valentine's Day.

I can be a prickly person to be around sometimes, so I try to do little things to remind my friends and family that I appreciate them. Valentine's Day isn't a huge deal around here, but I do like hand written notes.  Last year, I went a little old school...literally.  When I was in elementary school, we always made envelopes to hang from our desks on Valentine's Day to collect all the cards that the other kids brought.  At the beginning of February, I made mini versions of those envelopes for each member of our family and hung them by the door with a pen and handmade blank cards for us to  write notes on and put in each others' envelopes as the mood struck us throughout the month.  Of course, I don't have any pictures of the ones I made last year, but I'm planning on making this a tradition.
The first thing I usually do when I sit down to do paper crafting is pull together the supplies that I think I'm going to use for the project.  I never have very much time to work on things like this, so I don't want to spend all of it looking for a bottle of stickles.  You might notice that I don't have a lot of pink and red in this pile of stuff.  Each member of our family has their own signature color (this is one of my many little quirks, I'll talk about it eventually).  Mine is green.  Alfred's is blue.  Lilah's is purple, and we're still deciding about Michaela's, but it might just be pink (there's some hesitation about this because my niece's color is pink...we'll have to see).

The envelopes are just as simple as they look.  This year, I'm planning to make 3 x 4 cards for the valentines because I'm doing project life, so they'll fit nicely into the spots for the journaling cards.  I'll just use a pocket page protector for one of the February layouts in the kids' scrapbooks so these notes can easily fit.  The notes Alfred and I write to each other will probably end up in the family Project Life album, unless they're just so sentimental that they inspire me to make a whole layout about them in our individual books.  

Since I'm using 3 x 4 cards, I made the envelopes pretty small.  I started with a 6 x 9 sheet of cardstock and scored it horizontally at the 4 inch mark.  I folded it so I got a 4 x 6 face and a 1 inch header space.  I layered on patterned paper and white cardstock, then embellished with stamps, punches, glitter glue, and die cut letters.  The sides of Michaela's envelope are adhered to one another using washi tape folded over the side, and Alfred's is held together with decorative brads.

I used one of my favorite new toys on both of these.  It's a glue pad made by Hampton Arts.  I got it when I was trolling around JoAnne's, which I often do.  It looks pretty much like a regular stamp pad except that it comes with a small bottle of glue that you moisten the pad with each time you use it.  That way, you can stamp images and then adhere glitter (like I did here) or flocking power, or whatever.  I just love getting intricate designs on my projects with beautiful, sparkly, wonderful glitter.  

What do you think?  Do you have any fun, low key family traditions for Valentines Day?