Being in the wedding business, Valentine’s Day is one of our favorite holidays! But, we have kids, so this post has a few ideas for kid valentines, as well as a fun diy chocolate box that you can use as a teacher gift, party favor, or wedding thank you.

First, the chocolate!

We printed our own design on Classic White cardstock for the exterior of the box, and created the base out of Caspian Cardstock. We also used a wrap of Napa Swiss Dot for decoration.

Last year, we made these adorable little boxes as Valentines for my children’s teachers.  I cannot take any credit for the idea, as I saw it at MelsKitchenCafe.com – a cooking website famous at our house for saving dinner multiple times a week.

For the main box, the base was cut out of Majestic Cardstock, and the exterior was from Napa Swiss Dot. We also added a wrap in Majestic tied with raffia and a die cut circle for a tag out of Napa.

One of the fun things about these little favor boxes is that you can make them out of any cardstock combination, so you can use the stock to match your event. In the above photo, I used patterned stocks mixed with solids, and on the upper two boxes, actually printed a custom pattern to make my own design.

The candy wraps were printed on an 8.5 x 11 sheet of White Micah Paper, then cut to size to wrap around each nugget.

For the inside, you wrap yummy Hershey’s Nuggets with little bands of paper to spell out your message.  We used “Valentine” for these, but you have 9 letters, so Thank*You would also work – or be creative to fit your event!

You can completely customize the look by mixing and matching colors for the base and exterior of the box.

Mel, the original poster of this project, made a fantastic tutorial. Here’s the link: http://www.melskitchencafe.com/2012/02/diy-valentine-chocolate-boxes.html

She includes some great photos and all the free templates you need to quickly recreate these at home so I won’t redo it here.  Just go there and get all the goods – as well as many great recipes.  If you’re doing a lot of boxes (like for wedding favors) and would like some help with the die-cutting or custom labels, let us know and we can fix you up!

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For the second part of this post, I wanted to feature just a couple of little {boy} valentines that you can download and print at home – for all of you last-minute valentiner’s like me (is that a word?). Similar ideas are out there, but I thought these turned out pretty cute, so I decided to share.

These valentines were printed on Classic White cardstock.

For the “Mustache” version (on the top), the .pdf sheet has six colors of cards. Also be sure to download the mustache template to make mustache-treats for your cards. We cut out the mustaches from black paper and punched a hole for the stick, then slid them on the end of dum-dum suckers (but use what ever type of lollipop you like). So, basically you are wearing a mustache as you eat the sucker. You could punch a hole in the card to attach the suckers or just tape them on the back.  Sorry, didn’t get a picture of this, but I’m sure you’ve seen these around.

For the Star Wars Valentine, we punched a hole where the light saber is coming out of Darth Vader’s hand, and put a lollipop in the hole (and taped it securely on the back so the presentation was nice.) You could also use a glow stick if you don’t want to do sugar (tip: you can get a bunch of small glow sticks at the dollar store for cheap!)

Here are the FREE downloads for these:

Mustache Cut-outs (cut out of black paper and punch a hole for the candy stick)

Mustache Valentine (6 per page – print on cardstock and cut out)

Vader Valentine (4 per page – print on cardstock and cut out)

Hope you enjoy. Last year I was up so late finishing these for my kids!  Get started earlier than I did 🙂
Happy Valentine’s Day from EnvelopMe.com