Learning to write well is one of your child’s most challenging tasks. It takes time, practice and lots of encouragement. Parents can help develop these life long skills, create memories and the love of writing with Valentine cards.
You can take your child to the store and buy some Valentine’s Day cards or find just the right Valentine cards to print, write a special note, decorate and send. Valentine messages are authentic writing experience.
Valentine Printables - Valentine's Day Printables for Kids | FamilyFun
Free printable valentine cards, Valentine's Day cards, card ...
Free Printable Valentine's Day Cards
Victorian Valentine Card History
Up until the early nineteenth century, valentines were handwritten love letters. It was not until printing techniques became more sophisticated, that the valentine business boomed. During the 1830s, the London stationery firm of Joseph Addenbrooke discovered while embossing paper boarders that by filing off the raised relief, he could create paper that imitated lace. Soon lace paper or doilies became the rage and English stationers competed fiercely to provide elaborate doilies that rivaled real lace.
Valentine collectors today consider the period between 1840 and 1860 to be the Golden Age of Valentines. It was during this time the printing technology of chromolithography was perfected, allowing an astonishing assortment of beautiful decoratively printed designs known a chromos.
Before this period card were made with woodcuts or copperplate engravings. Because chromos were easier and less expensive to print than woodcuts or cumbersome copperplate engravings and afforded graphic artists a wider range of colors textures and tonal quality; these decorative pictures soon became part of nineteenth-century mass culture and were use to embellish practically everything.
The art form of both homemade and commercial valentines began to flourish. The embossed and lace paper became layered, folded, honeycombed and held together with small accordion-pleated paper hinges that permitted three-dimensional valentines. Swags of fringe, feathers, fabric, tinsel, and glitter, including powdered colored glass, were added. Printed verses became hidden behind secret doors, and valentines began to have moving parts that permitted hearts or cherubs to twirl.
In 1847, a woman named Esther Howland of Worcester, Massachusetts is became the “Mother of the American Valentine” after receiving a Valentine from a friend was inspired to make her own.
Ester persuaded her father, a stationer, to order a supply of large blank lace-paper sheets and other valentine materials from England. She made a small assortment of samples and cajoled her brother, who worked as a traveling salesman for their father, to take her cards with him.
When he returned he had five thousand orders, Ester set up shop with some friends to help her. Miss Howland’s cards were so fancy she needed to be pack them in boxes, they cost between $5 and $10 in 1880. They became very popular and netted Ester over $100,000 a year.
By the end of the nineteenth century improvements in color-printing process soon gave elaborate commercial valentines the preference over homemade. Marcus Ward in England, Louis Prig from America competed fiercely for the valentine market. Prig introduced silk fringe, which became a favorite in Victorian valentines.
Today Miss Howard’s and early manufactured cards are sought after by collectors around the world.
R.R.Cratty
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