Paper Bag Puffy Hearts – A Valentines Craft for Toddlers and Preschoolers

This paper bag puffy heart is a great fine motor craft for kids to make for Valentine’s day. Children can experiment with a variety of skills – stamping, stuffing and sewing while they make these easy heart-shaped craft. 

If you’re looking for Valentine’s crafts for toddlers and preschoolers, you’ve come to the right place.

The hooligans and I LOVE crafting when there’s a holiday coming up!  With February right around the corner, our craft room is a sea of pink and red, paint, glitter and tissue paper right now because we’ve been making all kinds of fab Valentine’s crafts. 

This is actually the second paper bag craft we’ve made for Valentines. Earlier this week, we used a paper bag as a canvas for this stamped heart art. 

And today we made these puffy hearts.  This simple craft is terrific for young children because it incorporates a real variety of techniques – stamping, sewing and stuffing to name a few.

To make our paper bag puffy hearts, you’ll need: 

Supplies:

• paper bag
• red, white, pink paint
• wine corks
• scissors,
• hole punch
• sewing needle
• yarn
• styrofoam meat tray for a pallet
• a few sheets of tissue paper

Making your puffy hearts:

Open your paper bag right up by cutting it open.  Fold it in half so the back and front are matched up, and cut out one large heart. This will actually give you 2 identical hearts. Older kids can do this step themselves, while young children may need assistance with the scissors.

Pour several puddles of red, pink and white paint on to your pallet.  Now, hand out those wine corks! It’s time to get stamping!

Encourage your kids to mix the colours when they were dipping their cork stampers.  It made for some really pretty prints, AND it’s a great opportunity for little ones to learn about colour mixing.

As we were stamping and mixing colours today, Miss 3 excitedly exclaimed “HEY!  Red and white makes PINK!”.  I agreed, and said “yes, you’re right!”, and she responded “that’s like SCIENCE!”

We wouldn’t have had that conversation if we’d only been using one colour of paint or if I had discouraged them from mixing the colours.

When your paint is dry, match the two hearts up, and holding them together, go all around the edge with the hole punch, making holes an inch or so apart.

Older kids can hande this step themselves.  Little ones may need help holding the paper and manipulating the punch.

And now it’s time to sew that heart up, and make this heart puffy!

Secure a long length of yarn in place by knotting it, and sew all around the heart.  The kids love this step.

If your child is old enough, you can teach him or her some basic sewing stitches (back stitch, overstitch, running stitch, blanket stitch) like we did with our winter lacing cards.

This was this little hooligan’s first attempt at sewing, so we kept things simple. I

I had her stop sewing before she got to the end because we needed to stuff the heart. She lightly crumpled 3 sheets of tissue paper and stuffed them inside of the heart.  Then she finished up her last few stitches and I tied off the yarn.

Happy Valentine’s Day!

Looking for more Valentines crafts to make with your kids?

You can see them all here.

And if you want to see another really cool way to stamp with wine corks, check out our Cork-Stamped Flowers!

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Jackie Currie

Jackie is a mom, wife, home daycare provider, and the creative spirit behind Happy Hooligans. She specializes in kids’ crafts and activities, easy recipes, and parenting. She began blogging in 2011, and today, Happy Hooligans inspires more than 2 million parents, caregivers and Early Years Professionals all over the globe.