Valentine’s Gifts: Give a Hug

Welcome back to 31 Days of Love – a series of “lovely” crafts, bakes and activities to do with kids this Valentine’s Day. Helen from Peakle Pie sharea a “hug” with us today as her Valentines Gifts that Kids can Make! Check out our many Valentines Treat and Valetine’s Cards too!

Hello!  I’m Helen and this is Peakles my three year old daughter.  We were thrilled to find out that Red Ted Art was inviting us to share one of our crafts projects with you today!

We have been crafting and writing about it on our website called Peakle Pie.  We love to make things.  We love to play with things and best of all we love to make things to play with!  Over the past year we have explored salt dough sculptures, made lots of butterflies and been on so many different adventures.  Peakles is very proud of what we do and will tell everybody she can that she is Peakle Pie!

I try to maintain that ‘hands on’ feel with our site and Peakles is involved with every craft and activity featured.  Peakle Pie is celebrating its first birthday in February and we will be featuring more Valentines crafts soon.  Once again thank you to Red Ted Art for inviting us to share our ideas with you as part of the 31 Days of Love series!

A hug by candlelight is a simple craft idea that can be made with a few simple things that you may have around the home.  The ‘hug by candlelight’ for 31 Days of Love was inspired by Peakles herself as she likes the battery operated tea lights we have in the home.  She loves switching them on and watching the flickering lights.  Recently she picked up one of our many cardboard tubes and placed it over the top of the electric tea light.  It looked so pretty in the twilight and I gave her a hug which resulted in a ‘hug by candlelight’!

Giva  a Hug Craft: What you need:

• cardboard toilet roll inner or a kitchen paper towel inner (or you could use a sheet of thick paper rolled into a tube)
• paint & brushes – we have used red and gold for our hugs but you could use your favourite colour instead.
• scissors or a craft knife
• pencil
• sticky tack or plasticine
• electric tea lights

Give a Hug Craft: What we did:

For our first hug we cut the shape first and then painted it however it was rather time-consuming for a three-year old to paint.  We decided to paint the tubes first and this worked really well, so well we made three hugs in one day!

We then painted the inside and the outside of the cardboard tube.  Peakles used a mixture of gold and red and gold paint.  She painted the inner of the tube with gold paint.  Once they had good coverage of paint we allowed them to dry.

When the tubes were dry we carefully drew a ‘head, shoulders & arms’ shape on the tube with pencil.  Peakles helped cut the easier parts and I then cut out the detailed shapes.  We took the sharp pencil and placed a ball of sticky tack (you could use plasticine) behind it.  Peakles pressed firmly until the pencil tip through the tube and repeated this to make some heart shapes.  I cut out some hearts to let the light through.  Peakles wanted a ‘dancing hug’ so I changed the original ‘hug’ shape to make it look like a dancing couple.

Finally we placed a battery operated tea light under the finished hugs and switched them on.

During the daylight they look like golden sculptures but it is really during the evening when they come into their own with the flickering candlelight making them look like they are dancing in the dark!

Peakles and I always like sharing what we are doing :

rainbow ribbon heart

garden decorations for planters

real Scottish pink castle