Seeds of Love for Valentine's Day

Happy Valentine's Day!

The girls have a day off school today for Lincoln's Birthday (followed by President's Day on Monday - 4 day weekend!) so the Valentine's Day celebrations at school were held yesterday.

Here's a look at what Ava gave out to her classmates...

For me, Valentine's Day is a great excuse to work on something creative with the girls. Candy and sweet things are always off limits at school so we always need to come up with something else. This year I settled on an idea quite early and luckily the girls were both pretty excited about it. Inspired by the Tears for Fears song "Sowing the seeds of love" (if that doesn't show my age, I don't know what else would!) I came up with an idea to give small packs of flower seeds as Valentines gifts.

Seeds of love

As usual, I had grandiose plans about how I'd create the seed packs. I was going to screen print the labels, make the packs myself and sew around the edges to close them - a pun on "sowing the seeds". I like to be a little cheesy when it comes to these sorts of holidays! But of course, with Valentine's Day following straight after Ava's birthday and our whole family coming down with a virus over the last few weeks, I didn't have time for any of that. Plus I found tiny glassine envelopes at Paper Source a while back and they were perfect for this project!

Love from Ava

Rather than screen printing the labels as planned I ended up simply printing on sticker paper using my home printer. Ava created the text which I then modified slightly in photoshop (sizing, colour and spacing only).
With the labels printed our production line of assembly went into full swing. I cut the labels out with my Olfa circle cutter, Ava wrote her classmates' names on them, we filled each bag with wildflower seeds and growing instructions, then sealed them down with another label. Done!

Production in process

Our seeds of love consist of a variety of native Bay Area wildflowers, mostly California Poppies. They're all extremely easy to grow, require very little care and are drought tolerant which is perfect considering California is in drought at the moment. Plus giving seeds is kind of like giving flowers for Valentine's Day - flowers that last a lot longer!

Ready to give out

Wishing you all a happy Valentine's Day!