Valentine's Day Garland

Maybe you've already noticed... In honor of Valentine's Day, I decided to dedicate the month of February to all things pink, red, heart-shaped, and to do with love. The idea for this came a couple of weeks ago, when a friend told me that she has boxes and boxes of Christmas decorations, but nothing to put up in their place for the next decoration-worthy holiday. I realized that I'm in the same boat. Valentine's Day is not my favorite holiday (and that story is for another day), however, since Hannah came along, I find myself caring a good deal about holidays and traditions that I haven't given a thought since I was about 12. So I did some rummaging, and found a set of heart-shaped cookie cutters, and these became the basis for my new (and only) Valentine's Day home decor.



To make my garland, I raided my felt stash and found every scrap of red, pink, and white I had. I even snuck a couple of contrasting colors in there for good measure. I traced around my cookie cutters for nice even hearts, which I am not capable of making on my own, even with the tried-and-true 2nd-grade-fold-the-paper-in-half method.

Then I arranged the various sizes and colors into cute layered stacks.

I stitched these together, and even tested out some of the fancy stitches on my sewing machine that had been, until now, uncharted territory.



Finally, I hot-glued the finished hearts to a long piece of ribbon. I used 1/4 inch ribbon only because in college, I thought that was the coolest thing since sliced bread and bought about 1000 spools of it in every color - which I am still trying to use up. If I were going to go get ribbon especially for this project, I'd use wider ribbon - at least 1/2 inch.



Then I desperately dug through the closets, trying to find things that were red and pink to make a nice display on the mantel. I have a lovely hand-painted plate with pink flowers that my mom gave me last year for my birthday, but even though Jonathan and I both remember seeing it since we moved last fall, neither of us could locate it. I had to settle for an orange plate instead, leaving nothing red or pink on the mantel, but at least something from the same side of the color wheel...

All in all, not a bad beginning for a recent Valentine's Day convert, right? Hannah, who is very interested in shapes, thinks the whole thing is swell, and that's good enough for me!