It’s a well-known fact that arts and crafts benefit kids in various ways.

It encourages their creativity, helps them spend quality time with parents or older siblings and may also be a future career option!

But don’t limit your kids’ crafting efforts within pipe cleaners and craft paper. Let them try out different kinds of materials to fire up different parts of their brains, and also build more pathways between both sides.

One such material that’s not often used is yarn, a versatile tool that can be used to make all sorts of things, including today’s project, a kid-made Valentine’s Day Card with yarn. This is a craft project that can be easily customized based on the age of your child, and even toddlers can give it a try!

Kid-made Valentine’s Day Card with Yarn

Supplies needed:

• Yarn in different colors like red, pink, black and green
• Glue
• Card stock folded in the shape of a card base
• Heart shaped brads, buttons or embellishments (optional)

Instructions:

1. Using a pencil, draw a pattern of your choice on the card base. We drew flowers for our card. You can try hearts or anything else. Adjust the complexity of the design based on your child’s age.

2. Fill the center of the flowers with glue and starting from the outside, stick the yarn in a spiral pattern, moving inward.

3. Cut off the end of the yarn once you reach the center. For the petals, apply glue in a thin layer along the outline. When you reach the end of the base, let a little of the yarn wrap around before you cut it off.

4. Add as many details as you like, like we’ve done with that thin strip in the middle of the petal. Use a sharp pair of scissors to ensure the ends are neat and don’t fray.

5. Continue in a similar way till the whole pattern is covered in yarn. Use different colors of yarn to make it interesting. Finish the card by adding heart shaped buttons or brads.

Pretty easy, isn’t it? The biggest challenges here are probably keeping the glue within the lines and avoiding empty spaces when filling in. Use a glue applicator with a thin tip to have more control on the flow and go from the outside in when filling in a space. See, crafting with a different material also develops your problem solving skills! Now all you need to do once your card is dry is to open it and write a cute little lovey-dovey message inside!