Felt Valentine's Day Craft

This past Friday I got together with my friend Nancy and her kiddos for a play date and an attempt at making a Valentine's craft for the kids.  We had a really good time! It's hard to know in advance how much time we will have to devote to a craft, since sometimes the four kids are enough to handle without a project! :)

We started off with just hanging out and playing:

Buddies Trey and Erin. Erin will be 2 in March but Trey is gaining on her size-wise! 

She is so cute and teeny-tiny.

Collette came out wearing Nancy's sock monkey slippers and hat.  She was so funny!

Then my niece Amelia came to visit for a little bit, and all the kids were so excited to see her.  Collette helped Nancy give her a bottle:

And Noah, who has been talking about baby Amelia since Collette and Trey's birthday party, got a chance to hold her (with a little help).

Luckily, everyone played well together and we were able to get to our project-- making felt Valentine's cookie bakery sets for the kids to use with in their play kitchens.  I found the original idea for the cookies HERE and thought it looked so cute!

The only materials we need were a small heart-shaped cookie cutter, felt in a few colors (we used tan, pink, white, and purple), cotton stuffing, and a glue gun. (We also used toy rolling pins we already had.) We started by using a sheet of tan felt for our "dough" and then used our cookie cutter to trace six heart-shaped "cookies" in our dough.

Then we carefully cut out the cookies, making sure to keep the hearts whole so we could use them.  We cut out more 6 hearts so that each cookie had a front and a back.  I hot-glued the felt hearts together, stuffed them with a small amount of batting, and glued them shut, so we had puffier cookies for our dough.

Then we cut out smaller felt hearts in various colors (Collette picked pink, white, and purple) to be our icing.

And we cut up the felt scraps to be "sprinkles" for the cookies. Collette loved cutting the sprinkles!

And that's it! Roll out your dough, use the cookie cutter to cut out your cookies, add icing and sprinkles, bake and enjoy!

The finished project:

The whole project didn't take long, and would have taken even less time if we didn't have 5 kids ages 4 and under "helping" us! 

Collette has had a great time baking and decorating her cookies this week.  

Her baby doll Amelia even joined her for cookies one day. :)