Happy Valentine’s Day!

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Inspiration for the heart-shaped pipe cleaner glasses found here. I put a tiny dab of hot glue on each of the sharp ends of the pipe cleaners for safety.

Last weekend I assembled an IKEA Expedit shelving unit for storing all of my craft supplies. It was originally intended for Ethan’s room, but the construction of his room took so long that I found a different use for it meanwhile! We’re just waiting for the carpet to be installed now, so I guess I’ll need to make another trip to IKEA soon. Poor me…

While I was gathering all of my craft items into one place, I came across some scraps of paper left over from the paper flag bunting and the mini bunting cards I made last summer. So I used some of those colorful little scraps to create a very similar bunting card, but this time I made the bunting with tiny hearts instead of triangle flags.

I punched out two hearts of each color and glued them together with a string between the layers. If you make a card like this, I recommend gluing the hearts to your string before you tie it to the card. I tied the string to the card first and I almost ran out of room! And actually, if you glue the string on the hearts before tying it to the card, then you can just use one heart of each color, which would be easier.

I only made one of these little cards, and don’t plan to make another. But hopefully one of you will benefit from my hindsight!

Paper is my favorite material to create with, and white is my favorite color (even though it’s technically not a color!), so of course I had to make some Valentine’s decor with white paper. This simple paper heart garland was made from four sheets of white cardstock and some white thread. I punched out the hearts using the same punch I used for the framed paper heart art I shared with you the other day. Then I stitched up five strands of 35 hearts each with my sewing machine and tied them to a tension rod.

If it looks like the room behind those hearts is empty, you’re right! Once the carpet is installed in our brand new room, then we can put furniture and little Ethan in it. Can’t wait!

Can you believe that Valentine’s Day is next week? I feel like we just celebrated Christmas, and now another holiday is just around the corner!

A few years ago I discovered the folded paper heart art made by Sarah and Bendrix, and I’ve been wanting to make something similar ever since. Their white-on-white art is very sophisticated, but I thought my kids would enjoy something with more contrast. So last week I punched out a bunch of white paper hearts (and one red one!), glued them to an 8×10 sheet of black paper, and stuck the completed project in an IKEA Ribba frame.

Our baby boy was born a few weeks before Christmas, so I didn’t do any Christmas crafting in December. Now that the pain of my pregnancy-induced carpal tunnel has mostly gone away, it feels good to start creating things again!

You might think this is one of my kids’ craft projects, but it was actually created by yours truly. And you might say that it was created with just Crayola crayons and paint, but I prefer to call it a wax resist watercolor painting. Sounds fancier, doesn’t it?

I made this Valentine’s-themed wax resist watercolor painting way back in early January, right after the Christmas decorations came down. I guess I needed a little splash of color to replace the festive Christmas decor, and Valentine’s Day provided an easy motif to work with.

I grabbed a box of 64 Crayola crayons from my kids’ craft supplies and pulled out almost all of the pink, red, orange, and purple crayons. Then I drew one heart with each of those 15 crayons, sometimes filling in the heart and other times just making an outline. Next I got out my watercolor paint (just the kind for kids, not artist’s watercolors) and painted over most of the hearts with pink, red, orange, and purple. When the paint was dry, I popped the completed project into a frame that I recently spraypainted and called it art.

The picture above doesn’t quite capture the exact shades of color, but it’s close. And I didn’t even plan out the colors terribly well, so the fact that all the colors look coordinated instead of garish was pure luck.

Lovely pink, red, orange, and purple luck.