Valentine's Day Cards

Making Valentine's Day Cards

One year I decided we'd make homemade Valentine's day cards.  

So much more special and then it makes it less about a commercial holiday, and more about time I spend with my children, the thought put into a gift given to their friends and my ability to get to cut and paste something fun!

Sawyer made all the girls bracelets, and I told her I would make the boys.  She only has 17 children in her class, 6 girls and 11 boys, and I wanted her to enjoy the process so I agreed to take on the boys (plus I could finish 2 in the time it took her to do one).  

On Pinterest I found a cute cards I could print off and use, here for the Friendship Braceletes and here for the Stick 'em Up cards.

Reed's ended up being a lot of cutting and pasting, and the little pasting I let him help with, he was a pro.  Reed took guns to school with a piece of gum that said, "This is a stick up!"  Afterwards I am not sure if guns were the right thing to make, but it was cute and Reed's teacher liked them!

Decorating for Christmas

Needing to try something new for Christmas Decorations, I went with rustic.  I have always been a little partial to rustic anyway, and this just seemed to fit.  The best part, it didn't cost me a dime.

Reed and I went out searching for pine cones.  In Oregon, in the middle of winter, there is no way we were going to find dry pine cones.  But we looked anyway.  We found a bunch of closed pine cones, and they were soaking wet, but we picked them up anyway.

We came home and turned the oven on to 200 degrees and left them in there for an hour.  The house smelled woodsy and the pine cones dried out and opened it.  It was fabulous.

I found gold ribbon in my gift tag box .  With a hot glue gun in hand I started making the jars.

Christmas Jars

Large canning jars

sugar

tea lights

gold ribbon

twine

branch off the Christmas tree

pine cones

Really, they couldn't be cuter and they look like and smell like Christmas.  I used twine, more pieces off the tree and a cinnamon stick to wrap the napkins.  (Next time I will buy cloth napkins for this, but I was so happy to not spend anything on this project, I couldn't bring myself to drive to the store to do that.)