DIY Valentine’s Rainbow Box and competition

Tis’ the season of love and we are getting ready fo everyone around us to show us just how much they love us, kidding! (kind of) But seriously, we love Valentine’s day and a couple of week ago the Lars team was reminiscing on the good ole’ days when you got to make a Valentine’s box for school. I quickly realized this tradition may have been something my team did much more frequently than I did as children and I decided that the solution to this was clear, make up for lost time and opportunity by making a Valentine’s box every year for the rest of my life, dramatic? I think not!

It seemed the only way to properly kick off this new tradition of mine would be to make a rainbow box to receive all my love letters in (Paul may have to work overtime to fill this bad boy up, it’s got LOTS of space in it…).

2020 Valentine’s Box Challenge

Once I was done with my box, I brought it into work to show the Lars team. It was a hit! Then the team decided that they all wanted to make their own boxes too and things escalated and I don’t want to say things got competitive but we’ll just say the 2020 Valentine’s Box Challenge was born and we want to invite each one of you to participate along side us!

The rules

Here are the rules, there are no rules! Make whatever your heart desires and share a picture on Instagram and tag us with @houselarsbuilt and #LarsValentineBox by Febraury 13th the winner will be announced on February 14th and a little Lars care package will make its way to the winner shortly thereafter.

Directions:

1. Using a pencil draw a rainbow shape of the cardboard, once you have a shape that you like cut it out mine is out 17″ long from one base to the other and 7″ wide and 14″ tall.
2. Trace the shape of the rainbow arch cut out in step one on another piece of cardboard and cut it out.
3. Once you have the two arches cut out cut strips of the cardboard that will be used to connect the pieces together, you will need enough to connect the top of the rainbow and the bottom of the rainbow. I cut my trips to be 7″ wide and cut them as long as i could get them out of each piece of cardboard I had.
4. With the newly cut long strips you will want to bend them so that they can create the arched pieces easily. To do this you can run it down the side of a table applying pressure as you go to break down the board, you will see that the cardboard starts to hold an arch.
5. once you have these pieces cut bent will begin to assemble them together.
6. Using a hot glue gun apply and generous amount of hot glue to the edge of the rainbow and place the arched long cardboard pieces to create an edge along the rainbow arch piece. If the 7″ wide piece does not make it all the way across you can add in another piece to get it all the way to the bottom.
7. Once the piece is attached take your second rainbow arch and use hot glue to in the same manner to attach that piece.
8. Once the top of the piece is done you will add the underbelly of the arch by repeating step 6.
9. You can trim with scissors or a craft cutting blade and excess of the 7″ strip of cardboard.
10. Trace the bottoms of the rainbow onto cardboard where it is still open and cut the pieces out and attach them with hot glue.
11. Cut a slit at the top for all of your hards to be placed into and your form is done!
12. Cut strips of news paper about 1.5″ wide by 7″-13″ long
13. Make paper máche for your rainbow form.
14. Apply a light layer of paper máche covered news paper to your form and allow sufficient enough time to dry, I left mine overnight.
15. Once dry you can paint onto it!
16. I measured mine out a little so I had a good idea of how much of each color I could fit onto the rainbow.
17. Once your box is painted and dry you can can cut flaps into the bottom of the rainbows to retrieve all of your love letters!

Let the Valentine’s games begin! We are taking this very seriously! Ha!