"Oh, Mr. Postman!" - Valentine's Day Mailbox Tutorial

As a kid, I used to love waking up on almost any holiday morning! When my brother and I woke up on holiday mornings, there were usually some sort of cute holiday-themed goodies waiting for us that my parents had set out the night before! Well I want to be one of those types of moms, too. ;) Even though my son probably won't remember this Valentine's Day, I want to start a tradition of making every holiday special for him - so this week I started making a Valentine's Day mailbox for my son to receive all his special Valentine's Day goodies. I'll take you step-by-step through how I made one. Here's what my finished product looks like:

I was became inspired when my son and I were walking through our local Michael's craft store and I saw this cute little red mailbox. He kept reaching out to play with it, so in the cart it went! At only three dollars I figured we couldn't go wrong, even if he just wanted to play with it by opening and closing it (yes, he's at that MECHANICAL stage). I found some rhinestone decals for a dollar each, I bought one for each side of the mailbox. Then I shelled out another whole dollar (whoa, big spender I know!) to get some scrapbook paper and we were on our way home to create our new one-of-a-kind Valentine's Day mailbox.

I started this project with the mailbox, an extra glass candlestick holder I had laying around {probably from one of my various Goodwill sprees}, 2 rhinestone decals, one piece of scrapbook paper, some E-6000 glue, and my trusty Modge Podge.

After I had gathered all of my materials, the first thing I did was spray paint the glass candlestick holder black. While the paint was drying, I stuck my rhinestone decals onto each side of my mailbox.

Once the spray paint was dry, I glued my mailbox down to the candlestick with my E-6000 glue. Now if you haven't tried this stuff - it's addicting! You can glue almost any type of material to any type of surface you'd like. It works on paper, wood, metal, glass, you name it! Then I waited overnight for the glue to dry, although I believe the packaging says you only need to wait 10 minutes.

When browsing the web last week, I noticed Silhouette's free shape of the week. It was going to be a perfect embellishment for my project, so I re-sized the shapes using Silhouette studio to my liking and cut them out using my new Silhouette Cameo.

Once I had my shapes cut out, I Modge Podged (can that be a verb?) them together and waited for them to dry. Then I simply glued them on to my mailbox, and voila! Beautiful, new Valentin'es Day mailbox for my son!

He wants to let everyone know now that he has a mailbox, that he's officially accepting (and hopes Mr. Postman will bring him) Valentines! ;) What kind of Valentine's Day goodies did you create this week? What do you think I should make to go inside of the mailbox for him to open of Valentine's Day morning?

Project was shared here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here,  here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.