valentine gift for kids

OK folks, I have to post this on the down-low because if my kids see this they will wrangle it away from me before Valentines day LOL! I swear, my kids are like ants and they can sniff out any sugar source in my studio as soon I bring it in, it is a weird 6th sense…like a candy ESP or something. My kids love gum and gumball machines so I decided to make these for them for valentine’s day:

Don’t worry, I will give them all the same amount of gumballs! Actually I am making the mini pails (I got them in the dollar spot at Target after Christmas for .50 cents each, if they have any left they are probably cheaper now!) for them but I wanted to show an option of a large mason jar too. Both are cute! The large mason jar take 4 bags of gumballs to fill (Dollar Store size bags) and the pails take 2 bags. I placed sandwich bags in the pails first because I don’t know if the pails are food-safe.

On to the tips!

Notice the fiber wrapped pail handle. Rather than spend 30 minutes tieing short lengths of ribbon to the pail handle (which would be totally cute but expensive x 3 kids and time-consuming) I just wrapped a couple of yards of fancy fur yarn around it. Quick, easy and just as cute!
Those $1 alphabet sets from Joann/ACmoore are fun but the boxes they come in are not. Make a slightly larger origami box from paper so you can have a looser container for them and it will be easy to fish them out and use them and quick to put them away again. I have directions to make the box here.
Use a rubber band to hold stamps together when stamping with these mini stamps, it is so much quicker and your letters stay evenly spaced.
Color with ink to match your project! I dipped a brush in the grey ink I stamped with then watered it down to paint the jar lids. A perfect match and no need to drag out more supplies!
Flip a clear stamp! I only had 3 convo-heart stamps but wanted more colors so I flipped one of the clear hearts backwards on my block and stamped with the backside to make the plain yellow hearts in the jar. You can stamp a shadow of almost any clear stamp just by sticking it on the block backwards and stamping with the smooth side of the stamp, Neat! It’s like have twice as many clear stamps!

Here is a look at the tips in action:

And a close up of the stamps + rubber band:

A brief sidebar…How hard is it to find a large canning jar stamp anyway?!? I looked online for weeks for a simple large canning jar and couldn’t find a thing then I tracked the one I used down directly from Inkadinkado and ordered it on the spot direct from the company. I was so frustrated that I grabbed my own collection of vintage canning jars and made a digistamp set called Funky Jars to Fill: