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Monday, February 3, 2014

DIY Valentine Snail Mail Boxes for Love Notes






Last year after Valentines Day I purchased the red and pink mail boxes at Superstore when they were 75% off. All year I was planning on making a little love note station for everyone to write little family love notes. I just never actually got around to it.

The other day I found these paper snails and I knew instantly that these snails would be perfect to finally make our mailboxes.

If you don't have a little tin mail box to use you could make these with a small shoe box.

Here is how we made ours:

1) Gather your supplies
-mailbox (tin or a shoebox or similar)
-felt
-fabric paint
-scissors, glue, pencil, paper

note shown optional items
-a candle holder or mini vase to use as the base of your mail box
-googly eyes, heart gems, heart stickers

after your mailboxes are finished you will need
-paper, envelops, markers, stickers etc for your love note writing

2) Draw a snail pattern or print out mine below. Please link back in comments if you use it as I'd love to see how yours turned out.
3) Decide on the colours of felt you want to use and cut out your snail pieces. You will need one colour for the snail body and either two or three colours for the shell. We made both the largest heart and the smallest hearts the same colours.

4) Glue your felt snail on your mail box (we used a glue gun for this). You can also glue on other felt hearts or heart gems. Our heart gems all came from the dollar store last year after Valentines day. As much as I'd love to be a minimalist...I'm just not!
5) Add fabric paint details. We put a monogrammed heart on the mailbox door and made the mistake of doing the fabric paint before I had the idea for the gems. It was tricky to glue on the gems with wet fabric paint but we managed.


6) You can leave your mailboxes like above but Sierra actually came up with the idea of needing a post for the base. All I could find to use were a couple vases we used for our snowman milk one Christmas and they have been waiting for a new use ever since.
7) Set your snail mail love note mailboxes out for easy access. I really wanted to leave them out on this fabulous owl table I got for Christmas but when I put out the markers there was no room to write their notes.
FYI I got the inspiration from the heart mason jars from HERE. We also made a banner shown below too. For our hearts we painted newspaper with red liquid water colour paint instead of using construction paper. I love using newspaper in crafts.


We found another area more suitable for easy use and set up the mailboxes with markers, mini note pads, doilies, scissors, envelopes, glue and stickers.

And the love note making began.
I'm not sure if it was more fun writing the love notes, or receiving them.
I am so glad we finally got around to making these "snail mail" mail boxes and I am looking forward to all the little love notes that will be finding their way not only into our mail boxes, but into our hearts as well.

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