These Paper Heart Hands are such a fun and simple project!

I’ve made quite a few of them with my girls.  They only take a minute and they love to play with them.

What’s really awesome, though, is that they also make great gifts!  You can have the kids decorate them with doodles and stickers and send them in greeting cards to grandparents, aunts and uncles, and friends.  Or the paper hands can BE the greeting card itself.

On that note, they also make great homemade presents for Valentine’s Day or Mother’s / Grandparent’s Day.  But we like to make them every so often just for fun.

You make them by folding a piece of paper in half and lining up your child’s hand against the folded half, with their thumb and forefinger touching the crease, as shown above.

Trace their hand, or have them trace their own hand, making sure that the tips of their thumb and forefinger overlap with the creased edge.

Then cut out their hand.  Voila!

The space between the thumb and forefinger is what resembles a heart when you open it up, so try to make your outline of the hand resemble half of a heart in that space when you cut it out.

It’s okay if you’re a little off – like I was in this one.  Some look more like hearts than others.  My girls {and Grandma} love them anyway, even if they’re not perfect.

And one thing that my daughters love is when I take that “heart” that I cut out of the center of their hands and turn it into a little butterfly with just a few more snips of the scissors.

The “butterfly” is that thing in the photo that looks a bit like a number 8 with a pointy bottom.  Again:  young kids usually aren’t that much of a perfectionist when it comes to crafts.

Anything involving construction paper, scissors, hearts, and – possibly – butterflies is awesome for them.

The best part?  These make amazing homemade Valentine’s Day cards.  They’re easy to color and to decorate with stickers, and you can write a little message inside of them.