Getting Ready for Valentine's Day

Not much to say, except we're excited about Valentine's Day coming up (in spite of the fact that I vowed never to celebrate it!). 

At the fabric store last week, I spotted this hearts-and-cupcakes fabric in the remnants bin. There was a little less than a yard, and I just knew that it was destined to become some quick little skirts. So I literally whipped these up in about an hour, and here they are!  Mostly I just wanted so share these cute little girls with you.

Can you tell Lydia is saying "cheese?"  Hannah has already taught her the art of the phony picture taking smile.

Un-Valentine's Day

Siobhan and Jonathan celebrating our engagement

with some kind of crazy Turkish cocktail in 2005.

Do you love to celebrate Valentine's Day? I don't. If you've been following my February posts, which have been loosely heart/V-Day themed, you might remember that the only heart decorations in our house are the ones I made a couple of weeks ago. My "bah humbug" attitude extends beyond home decor, however, and into the entire realm of this holiday. Let me tell you why.

Have you been watching TV sitcoms this week? They've all been about Valentine's Day, or more specifically, romantically inspired plans going all wrong? In a sitcom, when it's happening to someone else, and everything is resolved in 23 minutes, the whole thing is really funny. When it's your life, and some things are never resolved, not so funny!

When Jonathan and I started dating, we took Valentine's Day very seriously (maybe because we were both so thrilled to finally be able to celebrate the over-hyped holiday). For a couple of years, we went out to expensive, "romantic" restaurants, usually Italian, which were overcrowded and had special (read: more expensive) menus just for the occasion. If we weren't really poor students without jobs, this might not have been such a big deal. As it was, Valentine's Day became not only a financial hardship, but really quite a lot of pressure.

Our visit to Ephesus.

After one especially memorable dinner at a fashionable Italian restaurant, where they sat us by the door and refused to offer us another table even after we asked (cold), and the waiter did not approve of our choice to abstain from wine (colder), we decided to eat in the next year. That was nice, but still a lot of work.

So from then on, we have purposely NOT celebrated Valentine's Day. Sometimes, Jonathan comes home with a nice card, which I feel guilty about because I don't have one for him. This year, we decided that since the Halloween candy is finally gone, we will celebrate V-Day on the 15th with some discount candy.

We did, however, go out to dinner last night. This had nothing to do with February 14th, except for coincidence. Rather, it was to celebrate our wedding anniversary, which is in November. Yeah, you read that right. But we were married on Thanksgiving weekend, and turkey does not make for a very good anniversary dinner. So we decided to celebrate our anniversary on the day we got engaged, which is sometime in January. It suddenly occurred to us that January was gone, so we finally made it out last night, for what was a very romantic anniversary dinner, which just happened to be on Valentine's weekend.

Eating some really good Turkish food, name unknown, which was one of the highlights of the trip for me. (Yeah, I'm that much of a foodie that cheese bread trumps ancient ruins and being proposed to.)

Since Jonathan proposed to me in Ephesus, we went to a Turkish restaurant, which had no pre-Valentine's Day crowd, wonderful food, and pictures on the wall of places we remembered visiting on our trip. It also cost less than $30. No accordion player, no wine, no pink cards. Instead, we had shish kabobs, baklava, and Turkish tea in those wonderful little clear glasses. And we had a wonderful time!

I Made the Cheap Valentine's Bears...

Last week, I was pondering whether I should spend money on store bought Valentines for Hannah to give to her friends, or should I spend time to make little stuffed bears out of fabric scraps for free. Thanks to your comments and my determination to be cheap, I opted to sew the bears. Here they are!

For those of you who wonder exactly how long a crazy project like this takes, and even more importantly, exactly where does a mother of a toddler find this time, here's the breakdown:

Cutting and sewing: one nap time

Turning and stuffing: one episode of American Idol plus the PBS special on Fannie Farmer (by the way, also the amount of time it took Jonathan to paint the dining room)

Embroidering the faces: Mary Poppins (this included stopping to play with the bears once Hannah unglued her eyes from the dancing penguins long enough to realize that Mama was sewing enough bears to build a Bear Tower!!)

Cutting and stitching the hearts: one bath time

Attaching hearts to bears: one episode of Glee

So total time: probably less than 6 hours. Unintentional revelation: I watch a lot of TV.

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!

Overachiever or Just Cheap?

Last night I was looking at some sewing books, just to see what I could see. I found a pattern for some very cute felt animals that were intended to be egg cozies, but with a little imagination and some pink hearts, could be lovely valentines for Hannah's little friends. Or maybe some tiny stuffed corduroy bears, also with pink hearts, would do the trick nicely. What a fun project, I thought.

So I told Jonathan about my plans to whip up a dozen tiny animals, and did he think the corduroy bears or the felt mice were cuter?

"Are you seriously going to make those for everybody? Isn't that a little much?"

Hmmm... Is that a little much? Here's why I don't think so (and I gave Jonathan a 30 minute rationale until he told me to quit talking and just write about it):

1. In the world of craft blogs making a dozen tiny animals for a cute project, and posting said animals for all 8 of my devoted readers to see, seems like a perfectly normal thing to do.

2. Since the local craft store was out of felt this morning, I eliminated the mice. On the other hand, I have at least three yards of brown corduroy I inherited from my grandmother (which means it is at least as old as I am) just begging to be made into tiny teddy bears.

3. And the most compelling reason last: because I already have the materials on hand, and "real" valentines cost money, the bears cost less than traditional paper valentines - even the most basic, generic kind. The only cost is a little of my time.

So the question is, if I show up to the Valentine's Day party next week with a dozen hand made tiny corduroy bears complete with tiny pink hearts, do the other moms think, "Gee, Siobhan, if you have so much time on your hands, why don't you just offer to watch my kids while I take a nap." Or do they have any idea that the real reason I come bearing bears is because in spite of the modest amount of time I spent at the sewing machine - which I enjoy, by the way - I chose the bears because I'm cheap?