Be my Valentine?

I'm kicking off a self-proclaimed 'sewing week' here on the blog with a fun Valentine's project I made over the weekend.

I wanted to make something fun for Elliott and Emma for exchanging Valentine's at school this year. I'm still in love with what we did last year, but it was for the house, not for school. Remember these fun mailboxes?

The kids still love their mailboxes and we used them again this year by giving my mom little trinkets to put in them for each child while we were gone in Hawaii. I checked at Target the last time I was there (last week) and they still had some of these darling little metal mailboxes. I actually bought a couple more because some of ours are dented now from all the 'love' the kids show them.

This year I wanted to try something different. There are tons of cute box and bag ideas on pinterest or floating around online, but nothing grabbed me. I like a lot of the boxes but it's hard for me to spend so much time on a craft when it's just made out of cardboard and will get destroyed immediately after the Valentine's party. The kids are still pretty young so I have to help them make everything...which in this case meant that they get to help make what I wanted to make.

I stumbled across a tutorial for some adorable fabric envelopes. The tutorial actually talks about making a regular sized envelope and then a needlepoint card to go with it. It's adorable! BUT there's NO WAY we would hand sew cards like that. So I took the idea and re-imagined it as a giant envelope the kids could take to school and it would work as their 'mailbox.'

Emma helped choose all the fabric, and both Emma and Elliott helped sew them...mostly by pushing the pedal down on the sewing machine while I fed the fabric through. But they each got a say in the look of their envelopes and helped as much as was possible.

Emma's is pink and frilly...of course!

Here's a closer look. We added a snap but Emma fell in love with this heart shaped button so I sewed it on top of the snap on the front. I hand sewed the X detail and was planning on adding some O's and bigger X's but I'm not good or fast at sewing by hand so it will stay just as it is now. :)
Elliott's is red with some bright stripes. I made bias tape to pipe around the entire envelope and then added a button tab and button. The piping was much harder to get even than I thought it would be. I ripped several seams out to adjust it and it took a llllooonnnnggg time to do. But Elliott is really happy with it! (Emma is modeling it here because Elliott was at school when I decided to take the picture of it.)

 On the inside of Elliott's I put his name in little felt letters.

And here's a closer look at the outside and piping.

So now that the envelopes are done...I guess we need to make some Valentine's to hand out. Or on second thought, I'll probably buy them. 

Apparently they work as hats too!