Joyce made valentines like it only she put pictures as well as verses inside the double heart. Some of the verses she made up. Others, she copied from old valentines that were in her scrapbook.
After they had tried all manner of heart valentines, made of plain papers, flowered papers, papers with designs, papers with figures, striped papers, cross-barred papers, they decided to try something different. Jimsi cut out a diamond-shaped figure from her paper. It was really lovely. It was a basket of daisies. The diamond was bordered with blue and Jimsi cut diamond-shaped pieces of white paper and put them at the back of the picture with a verse—the old, old verse that everybody changes. It begins:
“The rose is red, the violet blue,
Sugar is sweet and so are you.”
Jimsi changed it to:
“The basket’s blue—the daisies white,
I love you, dear, with all my might.”
It wasn’t a very wonderful verse but it was a real valentine verse and it fitted the picture of the valentine perfectly.
After Jimsi made her diamond-shaped valentine, Joyce tried to make one. She found a cross-pattern of little rosebuds in her Magic Book. She cut the valentine out like a diamond-shaped book and put leaves in it. The leaves were tied in with ribbon. From the centre of the front of her valentine, she cut out a wee diamond in the paper and it made a most fascinating opening into which one could peep and see a picture that was pasted inside. Of course, she used the crayons to finish the edge in color. Jimsi and she discovered that the crayoning of all rims gave finish to the cards.
And so the play went on and on. They made valentines that opened square like books. They cut bunches of flowers from the wall papers that had large floral patterns and then, too, they cut out bits of wall paper shaped like baskets. These they filled with wall paper flowers and tied at the top of the basket sometimes bits of narrow baby ribbon that they had treasured for doll-play. Oh, they made a fine lot of valentines—almost fifty! It didn’t take long to make a valentine, once one had chosen a paper to use for it.