Hello Everyone! How was your weekend? Mine went by WAY too fast. Not nearly enough relaxing or de-compressing occurred…but we had gorgeous weather and lots of family time, so no complaints here! AND…I managed to knock out Henry’s Valentines for all his little buddies (long before the night before they’re due in school!!!), and I am pretty excited to show you what we did!

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I realize pencil arrows are nothing new or unique – I am pretty sure I’ve seen a million variations on Pinterest in recent weeks. But these were really quite fun to make AND they photographed so darn cute that I had to share!

I am a big fan of the non-candy Valentine; and with having to buy just the package of pencils, these really couldn’t be any cheaper!

Also, Henry was a huge fan of these. He was right next to me the whole time as I was making them, and I could barely keep his little hands off of them! Not only are they really cool arrows, but they also happen to fly really well (like paper airplanes!) Score!

Supplies Needed

I started with this package of Valentine pencils from Michaels. On sale, I paid less than $2 for 24 pencils! Valentine pencils abound in the stores right now, but I liked that this pack offered patterns that would appeal to both boys and girls. If you can’t find any pencils in stores, these would work great!

I then used my roller adhesive (and the online software) to design and cut the three components to my arrow design out of cardstock. (By the way, I’m quite a few projects in with my Cricut Explore at this point, and I am still pretty smitten with both the software and the machine – that write and cut feature is THE.BEST! #notsponsored). Once designed and tested, I cut out a bunch of arrows in various color schemes.

YOU CAN NOW ACCESS THESE CRICUT DESIGN SPACE CUT FILES AT THIS LINK: https://design.cricut.com/#/design/24748139

For some reason, this link to Design Space won’t activate. Be sure you are logged into Design Space and then copy and paste the above URL into your browser!

Next, I used roller adhesive to join the tip and tail components together.

YOU CAN NOW ACCESS THESE CRICUT DESIGN SPACE CUT FILES HERE!

I designed my arrows to have little slots to hold the pencil in place (admittedly, used Amber’s clever design to figure this part out!). To insert the pencils, I just bent the circle tabs upward and (carefully) slid the pencil into place.

This is rather embarrassing, but I can’t find our electric pencil sharpener ANYWHERE…so I tried to sharpen all my pencils with a manual sharpener. A dozen hand cramps and not-so-pointy-tips later, I gave up and settled for blunt pencils. That’s okay – these pencils are for pre-schoolers, and they really shouldn’t have super sharp pencils anyway 😉 Right?

I inserted all the pencils into the paper arrows to create quite a love-ly quill of arrows!

I’m pretty giddy with how these turned out. And Henry is just over-the-moon excited to hand them out to all of his friends this week!

And one more dose of reality for your Monday. Photo shoots with almost-4-year-olds are NOT as easy as some blogger make them look! Pair this wiggle worm with my mediocre camera skills and we ended up with tons of outtakes and just a few decent shots! But man, those big brown eyes sure do get me every.single.time. #lovethatkid #somuchpersonanality #iwantedtheredshirt #hewantedtheblue #yesibribedwithfruitsnacks

In this photo, his little fist was the ONLY thing in focus – loved it!

Five days before Valentines Day, and we are ready! Are you making home-made Valentines this year? Are you ready to go? If not – you still have plenty of time to pull something together. If you need more ideas, you can check up my Valentine projects roundup here!

YOU CAN NOW ACCESS THESE CRICUT DESIGN SPACE CUT FILES AT THIS LINK: https://design.cricut.com/#/design/24748139

For some reason, this link to Design Space won’t activate. Be sure you are logged into Design Space and then copy and paste the above URL into your browser!

Hope everyone’s week is off to a wonderful start! See you back here Wednesday with a top-to-bottom transformation that newbies to THIHM won’t want to miss!

See you then,