Valentines and Valentine’s Day Decorating

For my Valentine’s treats, I decided to continue with the tarot theme I used for Halloween, but I didn’t want to give friends and acquaintances the lovers card, so I googled tarot card for friendship and found the Three of Cups.

I attached them to three Dove milk chocolate hearts and wrote “To Friendship” on the back.

I’ve been making hanging Valentine’s cards for over 20 years, so there are a lot now, and since I’ve also been making and buying ornaments, the kitchen garland was getting pretty crowded. I decided to hang the hanging heart cards separately this year. I attached them with tiny clothespin to some Be Mine ribbon tape and hung them in the windows.

(I gave my husband the m&m characters to arrange, and this was how he placed them!)

And here’s the garland. It sports two new hearts – a wooden one with a red ribbon which we bought in Door County three years ago and which has been lying forgotten in a drawer since (top left) and a purple glass one I bought at a flower shop downtown this year (top middle above the arrow). Since all the paper hearts are hanging in the window, we had room to bring back some of the older ornaments, too.

On Instagram recently, Brittany from the House That Lars Built demonstrated how to make a Victorian folding valentine, and I decided I wanted to make some too. I couldn’t figure out how to make one from her directions, but I did some googling, and after watching several YouTube videos, I finally figured it out. I decorated them with stamps and colored pencils.

Here are some photos I took at the beginning of the process before I bought some new ink. Unfortunately, if I used regular copy paper, the stamps were visible on the other side of the paper. I made several trips to Michael’s to buy paper that was slightly thicker but kept buying paper that wasn’t what I needed. I finally found some at the children’s museum, but using thicker paper made the folding more challenging. While I was never fully satisfied with any of them, it was fun to make and share them with family anyway!