Color Your Heart Out Valentines!

Valentine's Day is coming up!  It's one of my favorite holidays.  I miss the days of passing out Valentines at school, which I was doing until just a few years ago with my first graders! Luckily now my girls are old enough to start taking part in the tradition!  Last year's Valentines looked like this, with some candy attached.  I went with a candy free option this year mostly because these little crayon packs are so cute!  You could put so many other coloring related things inside here as well!

 



 

 

 

You can have these too!  Download the file by clicking HERE.  To assemble, print the Valentines onto white cardstock and cut out.  Use plastic treat bags like these, insert coloring related gift, and possibly cut some excess plastic from the top. Fold Valentine in half and place over the top of the bag.  Staple near the bottom edge of the cardstock. 



Happy Almost Valentine's Day!

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Bacon Wrapped Dates Appetizer

Bacon wrapped dates.  Possibly the best appetizer of all time.  In fact, we make these for dinner sometimes, just so we can eat them more often.  They're seriously that good!  This is actually only my second time making them because my husband always does it, but I did a pretty good job!  You have to try these sometime even if you think you don't like dates.  I promise if you like bacon then you'll like dates wrapped in bacon!

Ingredients for 12 bacon wrapped dates:

12 almonds, blanched

12 Deglet dates, pitted (other dates may work as well, but these seem to be the right size)

6 slices of bacon cut in half

Directions:

1. Blanch almonds by placing them in boiling water for about a minute.  You'll be able to see the skin get a little baggy and after you remove them from the water, they just slide right out!

2. Push one almond into each date.

3. Wrap each date in half a slice of bacon. Secure with toothpick.

4. Place on tin foil covered cookie sheet.

5. Set oven to 400 degrees and then place cookie sheet in oven.  There's some trick to letting the bacon come to temperature with the oven.  Watch the bacon and turn dates carefully once the bacon starts to brown.  Remove from oven when the bacon is cooked to your desired crispiness.

6. Let cool.

7. Enjoy! 

We've made a variation with blue cheese stuffed inside the date, which is also very good!  Yay for Super Bowl and another excuse to eat bacon wrapped dates!

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Chronicles of a Big Girl Room: Light Up Canvas Art

This big girl room makeover is taking FOREVER.  We have the furniture, finally, but no bedding.  Being a typical three year old, she is very particular about the blanket she sleeps with and wants nothing to do with "cold" (cotton) duvet covers.  I'll probably end up getting one of PB Kids chamois duvets, but it seems like a lot of money if she's completely content with a fuzzy blanket!  In the meantime, I've been trying to focus more on the walls.  So far she has the two scrapbook paper dress canvases and her PB Kids inspired Princess Dress Boutique sign, but her room has a ton of blank wall space, so it still looks bare! 

Keeping with the princess theme, (I'm slowly losing the battle of keeping it subtle and more unique by focusing on dresses...) we decided to add a castle to the decor.  After a really fun trip to Disneyland where we stayed at the Disneyland Hotel, we fell in love with the castle headboards that light up!  Here's a link if you haven't seen them.  I've had a canvas lying around that I originally painted for Lila's nursery, but never finished.  Before I had a chance to do anything with it, we moved and the girls switched color schemes, so it was up for grabs for Camille's room.  Here's what I came up with:

The castle is a replica of Sleeping Beauty Castle in Disneyland.  I pulled up a picture of its silhouette online and drew it out onto pearlescent scrapbook paper.  Because the paper was only 12x12 and the castle is pretty big, I had to piece it together.  You could also paint it on, or even get one cut from vinyl if you wanted to avoid seams.  I just really wanted to use pearly paper. ;)  The castle is glued on with rubber cement.  Oh, and the damask background is what I had previously painted.  I actually drew it onto contact paper and created a stencil.  I originally had big plans for this canvas, but I think it turned out pretty neat this way.

The fireworks are white Christmas lights.  I started with a strand of 50, but ran out about halfway through, (I didn't realize how many lights I'd be using for each firework!) so I added another 100.  Another 100 was overkill, by the way. If I were to do this again I would do the math beforehand and just start with 100 total!  Anyway, to create the fireworks, I drew firework shapes on the back of the canvas and kind of just jumped in.  I poked tiny starter holes in the back with an exacto knife and then poked my lights through.  The lights kept threatening to jump back out, so I secured them with hot glue. This part took a LONG time.  I don't know if it was just the hot glue I was using or what, but I had to hold each light for almost a minute before I could move on to the next one!  I had the genuis idea (of course when I was almost completely done) of just poking the holes in the canvas and then stringing the lights across the back rather than poking them through.  It would probably work just as well... ah, well, maybe next time. :)

Here is how I dealt with the back.  You definitely need to use a deep canvas for this project to wrangle the cords.  There's probably a much better way to do this...

 See all those lights on the bottom?  Those are all the unused lights.  My husband figured out which bulb to pull out so that those aren't lit up when the top ones are on.

Here's the back up close:

And the front up close:

And the final product once again:



I'm pretty happy with how it turned out!  It definitely looks neat at night.  Best of all though was Camille's huge smile when she saw the fireworks light up. :)

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For the Harry Potter Fans...

I've probably mentioned before that my husband is the most difficult person to buy gifts for.  If he needs something, he buys it, and if he wants something, only he really knows which color, size, style, brand, gigabytes of memory etc.  Every once in awhile I get lucky and he'll mention something and I buy it before he does, but it's a pretty rare event. ;)  For Christmas this year I decided to take one of our favorite scenes from Harry Potter and turn it into a sort of love note/piece of art for him. 
 

 "after all this time?" "always."

 

Even if you're not a super nerdy, take yourselves and your two tiny children on a pilgrimage across the United States to see the Wizarding World of Harry Potter in Florida type Harry Potter fan, this is still a pretty sweet sentiment. :)   

 

I made this using my Silhouette for the words and hand cut stencils for the trees and doe.  The font for the words 'after all this time' is actually the font used in the books (I know, it just keeps getting more obsessive! It's Adobe Garamond in case you're interested.) ;)  To make the trees, I cut tree shapes out of brown craft paper and then cut notches in the sides so they'd look like birch trees, just because I like birch trees.  I looked up a picture of a doe and drew her on the craft paper as well, and then cut her out.  I glued the tree stencils down with glue stick (I would've used spray adhesive but I was out!), painted the gray around them, and then peeled the trees off after the paint was mostly dry.  I glued the word stencils on and painted inside of them, once again peeling them off when the paint was dry, and lastly added the doe using the same technique.  I sanded the whole thing lightly to give it a slightly distressed look. 

 

 

 

 

This will go in our bedroom as soon as I decide which wall to hang it on!  Quotes, song lyrics, poetry etc. make for really personal art pieces and great gifts... Valentine's Day is coming up!

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I love you because...

Isn't this such a sweet idea??  I think I originally came across it a year ago here, and I just finally got around to putting it together.  It took about 5 minutes.  I did have to buy the frames first, but I ended up already having one, so that was helpful.  After I designed them in PSE I just printed them on cardstock and put them in the frames.  I use a dry erase marker and write the love notes directly on the glass.  It's so fun to read them to the girls each time we go in their rooms.  Lila likes to point to the frame and say "I love you cause!" whenever we walk by.  When I first read the whole thing to her she repeated "I a good helper!" in such a proud little voice.  So sweet.  I've been changing it after I know they've heard it a few times.  Luckily there's a hall closet right between their rooms, so I keep the pen and eraser stored in there for easy access.

Our hallway is really dark, so they were hard to photograph, but this is what they look like outside the girls' rooms.  I think they're a really meaningful way to fill up the blank space!  I've included the art below in case anyone wants to print their own.  I think you can just save it to your computer!

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New Year's Eve

We had a small New Year's Eve get together with a few friends and had a great time.  My husband cooked the whole meal (as usual) so we definitely ate well!  I couldn't miss out on the opportunity to decorate a little for the dinner party, so here's what I put together. 

I went with a gold color scheme since we already had gold chargers from Thanksgiving.  The clocks were either from around the house or purchased from Goodwill, except for the large paper clock which I made using my Silhouette.  The clocks on the chargers and for the wine charms came from The Graphics Fairy.  I hung gold balls from my chandelier with monofilament and it was a really beautiful focal point.  The best part was that all of the ornaments were on clearance!

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