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Are you looking for an adorable box for collecting all those valentines? This DIY puppy dog valentine box will be the hit of your little Valentine’s classroom party! Pip’s grade had a contest for their Valentine boxes, and she tied for the “Most Creative” with this DIY Puppy Dog Valentine Box. I got the idea from Pinterest, but I couldn’t find any instructions for the actual construction, so we winged it. I wrote this tutorial so you don’t have to wing your own!
Full disclosure: This is not hard, but it takes a LONG time to make!! I think I spent over 3 hours on it, and Pip was helping too! Here’s how we started out:
Supplies for the DIY Puppy Dog Valentine Box
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- A large tissue box for the body
- scrap paper board (I used a cereal box) for the head, ears, and tail
- packing tape (this is preferred because it will be more durable, but masking tape or scotch tape would probably work ok) to attach the head, ears, and tail. Also to make a surface to attach fur to the side of the head
- masking tape
- hot glue gun and hot glue sticks (this is not the glue gun I have, but it is inexpensive and has good reviews if you don’t own one yet)
- skein of thick yarn for the fur (I used Lion Brand Wool-Ease Thick and Quick)
- 2 wiggle eyes (I had these in my scrapbooking stash already, but this is the size I used)
- 1 black pompom for the nose (or black yarn and make your own pompom)
- red felt/red ribbon for the tongue (I used velvet red Christmas ribbon)
- ribbon for the ear bows
- scissors
Constructing the body
An empty tissue box, cereal box, and some tape.
Adding the fur to the DIY Puppy Dog Valentine Box
Then I just started making some strips of looped yarn. I used Lion Brand Wool-Ease Thick & Quick. I only used part of a skein.
Sticky side is up for the tape. My loops were more even than this picture looks, but you don’t have to be too careful. You can always give the puppy a trim in any spot where it needs it once you are finished. In fact, in a lot of spots next to her face I did just that–left it really long and trimmed until it looked right.
Push the yarn down onto the tape really well, and then do the same once you get it onto the tissue box. I was afraid the yarn might come loose, but it has held really well through the construction and through a day in a 4th grade classroom.
After you attach, clip each loop. This was Pip’s job. She would clip while I constructed the next layer of loops–we made a great team!
Attach the next layer so that you are hiding the strip of tape below.
Constructing the face
The loops in the face area were very small, but the loops under the ears and around the face I made really long. I did trim them so that they framed her face. As I said on the picture, I used some packing tape to cover the sides of the head in order to have something to tape to.
Finishing touches: the top of the head, ears, and tail
For the top of the head and the tail, I used a strip of hot glue in the middle of really long pieces of string. I think I also trimmed the ears cardboard so that it was smaller, like I did on the tail. Then I gathered the long yarn from the top of the head into two pig tails over the ears. Attach a bow to each ear to hold it. Fill in with some long yarn under the ears if blank spots show up.
I attached the eyes, nose, and mouth with hot glue. I had to make the nose with black yarn, since we didn’t have black pom poms. The tongue is velvet Christmas ribbon (didn’t have any red/pink felt). Luckily I had wiggly eyes on hand already.
Pip was really excited about the results, and so was I! What do you think of our creation?
If you make this DIY puppy dog valentine box, link to it in the comments or send me a photo at pinktoesandpowertools (at) gmail (dot) com. I’d love to see!
***As an aside, we finally decided to purchase a new laptop after my last one was destroyed when I downloaded the Swagbucks toolbar. I’ve got a complaint ticket submitted to Swagbucks notifying them of the problem I had. It will be interesting to see their response. I just got the new one this week and I’m trying to learn how to get around Windows 8 now, and get all my backed-up files transferred. I like the new laptop I got (Dell), except for one issue–the spacebar doesn’t always work when I push it–it only works if I push the key in just the right spot. I can actually repeatedly replicate the problem by pushing the space bar toward the bottom. I feel like a huge complainer right now (Swagbucks ruined my computer,wah! My spacebar doesn’t work, wah!) but do you know how often you push the space bar???? It is driving me nuts that I am continually having to backspace to get to the spot where it didn’t space!!! My other computer was a Dell and I never had a problem with it.
And that concludes the whining portion of this post.
I hope you are having a great weekend!!
