Valentines 2022

I had been thinking of other clothespin ornaments I could make with the 99 clothespins I had left over after buying a whole package to make one Anne of Green Gables ornament. Even though I had decided not to make a Wizard of Oz Dorothy clothespin ornament, I couldn’t help but think that the best way to make ruby slippers would be to dip the ends of the clothespin into glue and then into red glitter. I was also thinking about some ballerina ornaments I made many years ago. I had made their skirts out of doilies and I had dipped some of their heads in glitter rather than making embroidery floss hair. All these ideas and memories percolated in my head and Valentine girls emerged!

I dipped their heads and feet in red glitter and constructed their outfits from washi tape, ribbons, doilies, and tissue paper. Their pipe cleaner arms with bead hands hold traditional Valentine offerings. I constructed the cards and the candy box and just happened to have a tiny rose.

My valentines this year were also a result of brain percolation. At Christmas my Brooklyn niece and her husband were talking about their trip to Nashville and I had taken out the Hatch Show Print book to show them. It stayed on the coffee table and after awhile I picked it up and read it and looked at all the images of letterpress type. Then on Martin Luther King Jr. Day at the Children’s Museum, Derek led workshops on Pochoir which is using stencils to create posters and we offered stencils in several fonts or type. For our next session we introduced rubber stamp art and I was drawn to the huge basket of letter stamps of many different sets of alphabets. When I saw an image of a valentine with a typewriter and the phrase “You’re just my type” I knew what I wanted to do for my valentines. And of course I knew which candy went with them!