Valentine Decortions

I love any excuse to decorate my home, especially since having kids. So, when February rolled around I was ready to bust out some Valentine's Day decorations! Some of our decorations come from stores, but most of them are homemade because:

1. It's cheaper
2. The kids can get involved
3. I can make sure I'm getting exactly what I want

Some of these were crafts I made myself and some were made with my children.



I started off with some Valentine's Day Subway Art. This is a pretty popular trend and something I had never seen until Pinterest (oh Pinterest, you have brought so much to my life!) But, Subway art is an easy way to decorate for the seasons and add a little something to an otherwise boring wall.

I made this on picmonkey.com and it only took about 10 minutes. Simple!

Download here

Hanging above my subway art I have a little LOVE garland that I come up with on a whim. The area between the subway art and where I have a clock seemed so blah. And, I have a 3M hook on the wall (you can see the top of it in the picture) that I wanted to try to cover up.

So, I took some pretty coloured scrapbook paper and cut out pendants. Then, I cut hearts out of computer paper and wrote the letters on in thick black marker. It's all attached together with red wire. Again, easy!

Hanging between two large wall photos I have another heart garland. Again, I found scrapbook paper in colours I liked and cut out hearts of various sizes. Then, I used a push-pin to poke holes on either side of the hearts and strung them onto a piece of craft wire.

The next two crafts were ones Toddler Bee helped with.

The first is a craft we've been doing since Toddler Bee was old enough to assist in craft time. I used to make melted crayon art when I was a kid and it's always a pretty/easy/fun addition to our home.

We made hearts for Valentine's Day and started out with crayons in pinks/reds.

If you have a pencil sharpener you can use that to shave the crayons into a bowl. We, oddly, don't have a pencil sharpener. But we do have a zest grater! I carefully let Toddler Bee grate our crayons into the bowl until we had a collection of crayon shards.

It always seems like such a little amount but it really goes far.

We spread our crayon shavings onto a sheet of wax paper then layered another sheet of wax paper on top of that. You'll want to place an old blanket or towel under the wax paper or the wax will leak out onto your surface.

You also want to thinly spread the shavings onto the paper. If you do too many the shapes will be heavy and the colours will blend together too much.

Then, just cut out your hearts and string them up! That small bowl of crayon shavings gave us all of these hearts!

Finally, we made a Valentine's Lantern.

For this, you need some white glue mixed with water, a glass jar (label removed) and tissue paper in white, red, pink, and purple. Oh, and a tray for catching all the drips!

I cut the white tissue paper into squares and the coloured papers into hearts.

Dip your white tissue paper into the glue and form a layer on the glass jar. I was working with a toddler here so there were a fwe instances where he pressed too hard or added too much glue/water and the paper tore. It's not a big deal of that happens! You can smooth it out with your finger or add another layer.

After the layer of white paper we repeated with the coloured hearts. We didn't wait for the white layer to dry before doing this so, again, be careful of rips and tears.

You can keep going until the entire thing is covered and no white is showing but Toddler Bee stopped at this point. Let it dry and then add a tealight to it and ta-da! You can tie ribbon around the rim, too!