In Home Entertainment: Suminagashi Valentines

One of our plans for the Chinese New Year was to bake real fortune cookies and write our own fortunes for them. Back when mom first pinned the idea, it looked easy enough. Then, in the aisles of the grocery store, reading through the recipe, good sense prevailed. She could see a cranky mom and burned fingertips in the future of that plan, so instead we decided to make paper fortune cookies. We started coming up with great fortunes to include, such as "magic is in your future," "you are a princess," and "purple."

It had been a while since we'd done any Japanese suminagashi printing and, well, we thought we'd loop that in for a little Asian fusion and make suminagashi fortune cookies. To start, Kane used mom's circle hole puncher and punched out circles of brown kraft paper -- we tested a few out to see if it would take the ink and it did. It looked really cool in fact. Then we tried to fold them in to fortune cookies. FAIL.

We were getting antsy. Then Kane spotted the heart hole puncher and saved the day by reminding us that it was also almost Valentine's Day and we hadn't made any decorations or valentines yet. A few minutes later we each had a stack of valentines hearts ready to be marbled. It was actually my first time doing this kind of marbling and I LOVED IT. I couldn't get enough. And it was fun to have lots of little hearts to keep the momentum going.

Once they dried and mom pressed them a bit, we took some bright, blank cards and glued the marbled hearts on top. A little sweet message on the back and we had our valentines. As suminagashi printing always ends up producing mass volumes of gorgeous paper, we plan on saving the rest of our hearts for collage making.

This would be easy to do with shaving cream marbling, too. Or, if you're in the mood for another Valentine's Day craft, check out what we made last year:

*valentine's gift cards
*message in a cookie
*valentine's chocolate playdough
*tissue paper stained glass valentines
*tie dyed heart garland