A Valentine Garland!

Tonight was craft night and my friend Genevieve and I thought it would be fun to make something for Valentine's Day. I saw a cute heart garland in the February issue of Better Homes and Gardens and thought it would be fun to make. We each bought some pretty paper at Michael's. I found a book of scrapbooking paper on sale that had the customary pinks but also patterns incorporating some greens and browns. Genevieve had chosen similar colors with a bit more red thrown in. Just because typical Valentine's colors are red and pink you shouldn't feel restricted to using only those, at least we didn't :o)
Here's a picture of the scrapbooking paper pack I used with images of the patterns included.

First I got to work making a heart stencil. I'm terrible at cutting shapes out of paper in one go. I end up hacking away at the paper until I'm left with a tiny version of what I began with. And the only way I know how to cut a heart is the old fold the paper in half trick and I didn't want all my hearts to have the nice (or not so nice) crease down the middle. And Genevieve had the good idea to cut a smaller heart out of the middle of the larger heart to keep proportions/shape the same (you'll see).

Next I used my stencil to trace hearts onto the back of the scrapbooking paper. I traced the heart on the back so I wouldn't have trace lines on the pretty side of the paper.

Then onto the cutting:

Once I had my hearts cut out in large and small sizes, I glued the small heart to the center of the larger heart in contrasting colors/patterns. I next cut two little slits through the hearts with an exacto knife so I could string some ribbon through.

I struggled putting the ribbon through the slits on the first heart so I devised a shoe lace type end with some tape to make the threading much easier.

And with that little innovation I was able to thread all the hearts onto the ribbon in no time.

Brian then kindly helped me hang the finished garland over the doorway leading from the living room to the dining room.

And here you have the garland in all it's glory :o)

The green of the paper actually matches pretty nicely with the green of the dining room. Here's a close up of the hearts, I just love the paper and how the ribbon looks woven through!