valentine's day totes

The crafting bug has hit full force and I am making things like crazy, and I decided to blog about some of my crafts.  Since valentine's day was coming up I wanted to make the princess' teacher a tote.  I had already gotten goodies together to give to the kids and just figured I would do something kind of cute for the teacher, and one of the women from our church that works at the school too.

I had started a long list of things all related to valentine's day on my pinterest page, and this page had caught my eye.  

 of course, it was the nut heart necklace that drew me in, but after looking at the tote, I really liked it and had made one for the princess' K. teacher, and I just wanted to give it a go again.  I figured I would write up what steps I did, and maybe do a review of the products I used too and of course anything I would do different, or tweaks I did in their original directions.

I bought a 3 pack of totes from walmart, and red, pink, and white fabric paint.  This time around I used slick paint, but you can use puffy paint as well.  I grabbed some freezer paper I already had here at the house for my project too, and a pencil that I really didn't like how the eraser worked on to use as my dabber.

You will also need some kind of either cardboard or paper to put in the middle of the bag to keep the paint from bleeding through to the other side and an iron.

 First thing I did was cut a piece of freezer paper the size of the front of the tote bag, and then cut out a heart shape in the middle of the paper.

Next I ironed the slick side down onto the tote using the iron to keep the freezer paper down as a stencil.  Just make sure it sticks down around the edge so paint won't slip underneath your heart.  Then its time to paint.  I would put my paint on a paper bowl so  I could easily mix and paint, and clean up would be a snap.  I started with just white on the top.  Dip your eraser in the paint, and dab paint dots on the top of your heart.  I worked about an inch down, and noticed there wasn't much of a difference of contrast between the off white bag, and the paint, so I put a small bit of red into the white to make a very light pink.  Work your way down the first 1/3 of the way down then mixed some more red in to make a little darker pink.  You want to work your way down the heart to make an ombre effect.  Finish up the bottom 1/3 of the heart with red.  After buying pink paint, I noticed I really didn't use it because I just mixed white with red to make pink.  My tote ended up looking like this 

I set it aside to let the paint dry.  It is ok if you get paint on your freezer paper, your going to take it back off the tote once its finished drying.  Once it is dry and you like your colors, you can peel the freezer paper off the tote slowly.  It will just peel off easy and in one piece.

Just throw that paper away, and boom, it will look kinda like this.  

After that you can customize it by painting a name across the top of the tote bag if you choose to.  Since I had three bags, I went ahead and did all three this time around and gave one to the teacher, one to the aide, and one to my sister.  

Quick and easy craft for giving to anyone for valentine's day.