Valentine's Day Mobile with Tissue Paper Dyed Hearts

One of our favorite mediums to create art is tissue paper. We have used it for so many fun kids activities such as Tissue Paper Turkey Craft and Coffee Filter Flowers Made With Tissue Paper. So when I was looking for a Valentine's Day activity for my preschooler, I went back to my trusty tissue paper. What would Valentine's Day be without hearts (and chocolate)? We didn't use chocolate while making these tissue paper dyed hearts, but they are still pretty sweet. (Sorry, I couldn't resist.) The bleeding tissue paper dyes the hearts in bold, bright colors, making this a fun way to add some love to your home.

I used 3 sheets of copy paper and cut a heart out from each one. I made a large, medium and small heart.

I gave my daughter the hearts along with a cup of water, a small paintbrush and some tissue paper squares in various shades of red and pink. If you don't want to cut out squares of tissue paper, you can just tear large tissue paper into small pieces or better yet, have your child do it for some fine motor practice.

I had my daughter place the tissue paper in random places on the heart and "paint" over the paper with water. She was pretty determined to try and cover as much of the white space as she could, but these would look pretty with some white spots peeking through as well.

You will want to make sure your child is covering the entire square with water. This will give the tissue paper a chance to bleed its colors onto the white paper.

When all three hearts are covered with tissue paper, allow them to dry for a few hours.

When dry, peel off the tissue paper squares to reveal a colorful pattern on the hearts. This is optional, but you may wish to run a warm iron over the paper hearts to make them perfectly straight before hanging. I used a low setting on my iron and sandwiched the hearts between some paper towels before ironing.

Attach a length of neutral thread to the back using scotch tape. Leave a few inches between each heart. We hung ours by decreasing size. Tape a loop of thread to the top and your Tissue Paper Dyed Hearts are ready for hanging.

This Valentine's Day mobile will move around quite a bit. The color from the tissue paper was so bright it came through on the back too, so the hearts look good from every direction. The heart in the middle is actually turned to show the back side.

Since the mobile moves around so much it was quite challenging to photograph. The kids had a blast watching me try and still it only to find it moving again when I grabbed my camera. The problems of a blogger.

For more Valentine's activities check out:

             Hearts with Black Glue                       Valentine's Day Shaving Cream Cards