A Squirrellytines Day Card

Happy Valentine's Day! I hope you are enjoying the day and sharing the love,  and of course getting prepared for my favorite day in February: Half-Priced Chocolate Day! (TM)

Here's the card I made for my Very Special Somepony this year:

I recently found some woodland themed stamps with cutesy love sayings associated with them and I just HAD to have them. And of course, I had to use at least one right away.  I think it's a super cute card!

(How to Make) Yarn Wrapped Valentine's Wreath

It's almost Valentine's Day! You know what that means?! An excuse to put hearts everywhere (not that that I needed one) and a chance to make some fun crafts!

For me, that fun craft was a wreath. I decided a while ago that I wanted to make a Valentine's wreath, but did not know what. I am very into wreaths lately all of a sudden-which is actually pretty random because I never use to care either way for them before. (And I still need to share both my Halloween Wreath and my [second] Holiday Wreath from last year.)

After trying for a while, and failing, to find a heart-shaped wreath form for the project, I finally decided that I would just go ahead and make a round one. I wasn't sure what I wanted to do, so bought some hearts and flowers stuff, and decided I really liked the idea of a yarn wrapped wreath, so that's what I went with. I made this in about 2-3 hours a couple weeks ago.

I am really pleased with how this turned out. I just love how it's so simple, but at the same time, so charmingly perfect.  We joked that it looks like a little life preserver, and Shaun called it a "LOVE Preserver". So now that is its official name in our house.

If you would like to make one, too, here's how I did it. I am sure most of it is self-explanatory, but just in case:

1. Gather up your supplies.

You'll need:
-A Styrofoam wreath form (I found this small one at the dollar store back when I made this wreath, and just grabbed a few-it's about 9 inches across)
-Yarn in color(s) of your choice
-Things to decorate the wreath if you choose (not pictured)
-Hot Glue Gun and Hot Glue

2.  Decide on a pattern for your yarn.

You don't have to mark on the Styrofoam like I did, but I did find that it helped me keep it (mostly) even sectioned and to make it easier to remember what I was working on. I actually made the yarn balls because one of my colors was tangled and after I got it sorted out, I made this size ball, and it turned out to be just about perfect for my project, but this is not necessary if you don't want to-you can just cut long lengths of yarn to work with at a time.

3. Hot Glue the edge of the yarn to the back of the wreath, and then wrap the yarn around the section for that color.  Make sure to keep the yarn tautly wrapped around the wreath so it stays in place.  Remember to hot glue the end down once you get to the end of that section.

4. Do this a few hundred (or thousand?) times... Seriously, it looks nice, but does take a while. Your wreath  will start to look like this:

5. And then this...Yay, you're getting so close! You could even stop here if you like just the yarn-wrapped look.

6. Hot Glue any decorations you'd like to use onto the wreath where you like. (No Pictures for this step.) For mine, I used hearts that came in a roses stem that I found at the dollar store-one from each of my red and pink-and for the leaves and the curly-cues, I took off of some of my Christmas floral picks. (The nice thing about those types of things, they weren't specifically Christmas related so YOU can decide what you do with them.)

And.... Voila! You have an adorable yarn wrapped wreath to enjoy!

Mine is currently on my cubicle wall at work so it can bring me joy and be showed off. It does its job well, and everyone who walks by has told me it is really cute or that it turned out well. So I am pleased.

Here it is on our wall with a cute sign I got from Michaels about a year ago:

What Valentine's Crafts are you working on? (Or probably have finished by now...)

"Valentine" Card

Oh, Boy. I've been a terrible little crafty blogger again, and haven't updated in a long time. I am really going to work on updating the blog as I make my various crafts-sometimes it's hard though when the object is a gift and you don't want to spoil the surprise. But I'll work on doing better, I promise! For now, let's get caught up-there will be a lot of posts one after another. Here we gooooo.....

I had this idea suddenly pop into my head one day in January and started to work on it, but didn't like the way it turned out because the scale seemed off. So I tossed it and didn't think about it for over a month because I had scrapped the idea. Then we got more printer ink one day and I thought I could scale the elements that  needed. I scaled them up to where I was happy (and re-cut them since they were scaled from my stamps) and got this card.  I finished a few days before Valentine's Day, and even though it's not really a Valentine's card , I figured it was a good time to give it to the hubby.

I think this is one of my favorite cards I've made: