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Heart Sun Catchers for Valentine’s Day

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Happy Valentine’s Day, friends!  I hope you’re having a wonderful day filled with lots of hugs and smiles and love!  Today I’m sharing a cute little sun catcher tutorial with you.

Have you seen The Artful Parent blog?  Jean has the most creative projects for children on her site – I just love finding new ideas!

I wanted a simple way to decorate a bit for Valentine’s Day and had been eying Jean’s Sun Catcher project for awhile.  I was putting away dishes one night and came across my little heart pan and had an ‘a-ha’ moment – Heart-Shaped Sun Catcher’s for Valentine’s Day!

These were fun and easy to make, and really didn’t take any time at all… in fact, it took longer for me to find the fishing line then the whole rest of the project.

Heart Shaped Sun Catchers

Materials:
Clear “pony” beads
heart shaped baking pan
tongs or a large spatula
clear fishing line
drill

Directions:

Layer the beads into your pan so that you have one row (it’s best if the beads are all in the same way).  This can be tricky for little fingers, but it’s good hand-eye coordination, and you can make a game of finding colors, counting, etc.
Next, we enlisted Mr. Juggling Act’s help – partially because we were going to use the grill and I can start it to save my life, and partially because it was COLD out!  Heat the grill up and carefully slide your pan(s) into it.  Cook for about 10 minutes until all the beads have melted.  Doing this outdoors keeps the fumes out of the house, which is the one downside to this project.

Remove the pan from the grill and let it rest until the plastic has hardened – Mr. Juggling Act just left this outside and since it was so cold, it cooled down in no time.  Once the plastic has cooled, you can pop these right out of the pan.  I was worried about how this would affect my pans, but I didn’t notice any issues at all, and the heart came right out easily.

Now Mr. Juggling Act was off to the basement to get his drill to make a small hole in the heart so we could hang it up.  We chose to hang all tree on one long piece of fishing line, but these would be pretty strung up separately, too.
That’s all there is to it – Ethan though it was “so cool” that the beads melted into the heart shape and Liv loved the sound they made as they clinked against the window.  I’m looking forward to trying this project again with other shapes and colors.

 

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