Valentines Decor

Hello Friends, it is a bright and beautifully sunny day here in Idaho! We are just in love with Valentines Day here at the Brumley house. Valentines Day is such a sweet holiday, literally(!) but also of how simple yet meaningful it can be. I added just a few touches of Valentines decor slowly over the last couple of weeks, I never really feel like I should decorate for Valentines Day until February 1st but then BAM I turn around and Valentines Day is here. This first picture is my absolute favorite little spot decorated up for the day of love. Simple red tie backs on the curtains, and red hearts hanging in the windows. Oh look! That awesome pillow.The mother of my high school sweetie made that pillow for me, I may not love him anymore but I still love the pillow! ;) 

My grandma's hutch has a couple of little romantic touches, my fabric heart wreath, and some dried roses. I made the wreath several years ago and it got misplaced in our loft of holiday decor so I was super pleased to find it. My husband, nephew, and oldest son all looked for the mystery box that held it but I finally had to get up in the loft and look myself. I am soooo not a fan of ladders or lofts but I wanted my wreath! The dried flowers are some of the roses my hubby has given me that I have dried! I am so spoiled by him. 

 A little banner of hearts made out of sparkly pipe cleaners., hanging on my pantry door. 

 Hanging on a cabinet is my dump treasure heart wreath, with and added little heart plaque. 

Some heart garland graces our plant shelf. 

A sparkly heart wreath hangs on the bathroom door. 

This is the little display on my reclaimed headboard shelf, this is my favorite spot to decorate. 

I never really cared for these angels in my Christmas decor but I moved them to Valentines Day and it made all the difference! 

My Dining Room area, another dollar store heart, some red berries on the chandelier and a Love saying on the chalkboard. 

But this my friends is real life and real love ~ my nephew Josh and my sweet Darky dog, taking a snooze amongs the Valentines Day decor. 

Dump Treasures

Oh how I love a good sale, it is a great feeling to score something really amazing at a great price! Whats better than that? Getting it for Fer-eee (free)!

Our town dump has a little area called the "Clear Mart" - it really is my favorite store! My husband always knows I am in the mood to score some great junk  treasures when I offer to go to the dump with him. Sometimes these items cost a dollar or two but today I found four great things for free! 

My husband is NOT a fan of my dumpster diving...even if it is in the "Clear Mart" and not actually in the dumpster. (He has NO vision.) The first find was an easy one,  I spotted it while sitting in the truck as he unloaded the garbage. 

A great mailbox! I have BIG plans for this mailbox to be a part of my mailbox wall that is one of my visions for my entry way. 

This is the only thing I got on the first round of dump wars...........

I also spotted this super cool chair that clearly is screaming to be my first reupholster project. 

Hubby said no......

I put on my best pouty face and told him as he was driving away that he knows he has no powers against my pouty face.....so he turned around. 

At first he told me that it was unsteady, then he laughed and told me that it was just because it was on the gravel. What a joker he is.....

Then I spotted this perfectly cute flower pot and wreath! Clearly gems just waiting to be cleaned up and adored. 

On the way out of the dump he said "My pickup just decreased in value by putting this crap in it!" What a fun day we had.

Here is a little before and after of the wreath. Don't let the picture on the left fool you, those fake flowers looked much worse in real life, oh and that is not the chair we got. He had already tucked it up in the loft of the shop before I got home from an errand! He really didn't want it laying around! :)

I pulled the fake flowers off and lightly sprayed it with white spray paint. Now it is hanging sweetly on my cabinet door!

2 Valentines for Grownups in Your Life!

I whipped these up tonight in no time flat. The first one is for my very good friend, Jeni. She is also my neighbor, my son's Sunday School teacher and the one of the best examples of a Godly Woman I have ever known. I just LOVE her! And there really is nothing artificial about her. She is the real deal!

 I printed the saying out on a piece of cardstock and then just eyeballed a heart shape around it. Cut it out. Traced it onto a second sheet of cardstock and then hotglued them together. I left a small opening so that I could slip in a little Valentines suprise.

 Then I just hotglued these packets of Equal artificial sweetener packets that I bought  errrrr.... swiped from a restaurant (JUST KIDDING!)  all around the heart. She can actually use these if she wants. I used just a dab of hotglue and made sure all the sweetener was shook down in the package away from where the glue was going so that there was no danger of damaging it or melting it or anything funky!

This second one was fun to make too! The only difference is that I sewed it shut which was a total pain, and then I added some ribbon that I had ruffled. I hotglued the ribbon on. For some reason my ruffling didn't turn out quite as good as I was hoping but hey I am new at it so I will just keep working with it! Here are some shots of that one for hubby man!

and the fine print.....

on the back side.....

He doesn't really have to break it open it has an opening too.

Happy Valentines Day!

White Chocolate Popcorn!

I just love to share the love around Valentines Day! I had heard about White Chocolate Popcorn and how good it was to make but never would I have imagined just how EASY it is to make! Are ya ready? First pop a bag of microwave popcorn. Line a cookie sheet with waxed paper.

Dump the popped popcorn out onto the pan and then take big handfuls and dump into your mixing bowl. Make sure to sort out all the unpopped kernels. Dump those into the garbage or if you have an unhealthy habit of eating them like me snack away!

Melt two squares of White Bakers Chocolate or Almond Bark in the microwave. I melted mine for 20 seconds, stirred, melted again for 20 seconds. Now I added three drops of red food coloring and gave it a quick stir.

Dump the melted chocolate over the popcorn and stir it up, making sure that you are stirring gently, you don't want to crush the popcorn kernels.

When the popcorn is evenly coated with chocolate, pour it back onto the waxed paper. Let sit for at least 20 minutes.

 Package up pretty and give, or toss in a bowl and keep it for yourself. Yum Yum! I got about two bagfulls out of each batch. Making each gift about 40 cents. I used cutout paper hearts for labels, on the front  I wrote White Chocolate Popcorn and on the back I wrote the recipients names. I also made some extra so that if I ran into someone I knew  I had a sweet little gift to brighten up their day.

Sweet Valentines Topiary

*** This is a loooooooong tutorial, seems I was a little chatty this morning so I have made each step BOLD so if you are wanting just the basic instructions they will show up better without all the chatter!

One of the funny things about crafting is that sometimes a project turns out way better than what you are expecting, as the case was with my glittered wood hearts. Other times it seems that a project looks easy and amazing in your head and then reality hits you upside the head with a big thud. Sigh.....this was one of THOSE projects. But, I have good news. I have got it all worked out so if YOU choose to recreate this project it should be easy breezy. But first a shot of the finished project.

(Oh my I love this topiary and no it is not leaning it is just my un-awesome photography skills!)

A couple of notes about this topiary are that the hearts are made out of salt dough so they are practically free! And the stem is made from wooden bamboo skewers so totally cheap there as well. So here is the rundown along with lots of pictures of my fabulous (now that it is completed) topiary!

Gather Your Supplies:

Salt Dough - Get the recipe here!

Heart Shaped Small Cookie Cutter (mine was slightly larger than a quarter)

5" Styrofoam Ball

Green Spray Paint (optional)

Wooden Dowel or Wooden Skewers

A Base for your topiary

Green Fabric (approximately 1/3 yard)

Red Acrylic Paint ( I used Deep Burgandy by Americana)

Hot Glue Gun

Brown Spray Paint

Ribbon

White Marker Pen

First step is to roll out your salt dough and cut out your hearts. I used 34 hearts. Exactly. I know because that is how many I cut out originally thinking it would be plenty. And that I could always make some more if I ran out. Well I started glueing them on randomly and got about 1/3 of the way done. No big deal I will just cut some more out. Oh but it was a big deal, a very big deal. Because somewhere along the way Mischievious Mike decided that he wanted to play with and LOSE my cookie cutter. I searched high, I searched low, I bribed the older boys to find it. Still no cookie cutter and to this day it is still lost. Ugh... Soo I peeled all of those hearts off of my topiary and decided that they would just not  be as close together, but I wasn't giving up. So 34 hearts it is!

After they are baked and cooled, paint the hearts red. Spray paint your styrofoam ball green. I learned a little lesson here. Acrylic paint, which I use all the time, does not dry well on styrofoam! It takes f o r e v e r. So use spray paint on styrofoam. Now it is time to start gluing your hearts to your styrofoam ball. The first time around I just went with it and glued them on. But then, when I only had so many hearts to work with I decided to be more systematic about it. So I divided my styrofoam ball using a marker. Like so....

So now I have 8 sections, 4 hearts per section plus 2 extra. Okay. Glue those hearts down. I used hot glue and I put the glue on the heart and then the heart on the strofoam ball. Soon your ball will look like this.

Cut your green fabric into squares 1 1/2" by 1 1/2". I used a little less than 1/3 of a yard of fabric. So you might want to cut as you go. Cutting all your fabric will most likely result in too many squares.

Now you will fill in all the bare spots with your fabric. I dabbed a little hotglue on the styrofoam ball and then layed down a square of green fabric, taking a stylus I poked at the fabric till it was stuck in the styrofoam ball and scrunchy. My pictures of this stuff stink but here they are.

(See how the fabric is laying flat)

(And how I scrunch it up)

Time to paint the stem and base of your topiary. Now if you are normal you will NOT be doing this in your laundry room at 2:00 am. But heres a tip, Magic Erasers are great for getting spraypaint overspray off the wallpaper! At first these wooden skewers were giving me a hard time to paint them. But I showed them. I stuck them into a paper bowl and then I was able to paint all sides.

Give them a couple of good coats letting them dry the full amount of drying time (or 5 minutes like I do). Now is when you want to take your paint marker and write on your base if you want to. I wrote "Grow Love" on mine.  Once dry you can take the sharp end of the skewers and poke them into your finished styrofoam ball. Now you can use floral foam for the base. But I used left over salt dough. I filled the base completely full of it. Here is the benefits, for one it is free and it also makes the base quite heavy which is a good thing to counterbalance the weight of the topiary top. It takes a while to dry which is a drawback but it is what I used and I am glad I did. Almost finished. Stick the other ends of the stem/dowel/skewers into the base and let dry (this does take at least overnight). To finish I added some more squares of green fabric to the base and tied a little bow around the stem.

I am so in love with this project that once V-Day is over I am moving it to my bedroom. Seems appropriate right?

Cute and Cheap Valentines Project!

Gah! I am soooo in love with this project. When I purchased the little hearts I had what I was going to do with them in mind but it turned out so much CUTER than I ever imagined! It is so stinkin' adorable. I asked hubby what he thought and he said "You made that, nah, it looks professional" Not too sure if I should be proud or upset with his lack of confidence. Hahaha. This project was also CHEAP. I used two packs of these hearts that I bought at JoAnn's in their $1 section. They originally look like the message hearts but I don't really like those or like pastels in my house so I did something different.

What you need for this project:

Wooden Hearts
Skewers or Pieces of Thin Dowel
Block of Wood (I used a spare chunk of 2x4) mine is 5" long
Paint (Red, Black and White is what I used)
Spray Adhesive
Glitter
Sharpie Marker
Drill and A Glue Gun

First I painted the hearts, for my project, I used 7 hearts, 3 red, 3 white and 2 black.  Between each coat I outlined the words that were pre-printed on my hearts. If your hearts don't have words just freehand sweet little sayings. I also painted my skewers and my block of wood black.

I sprayed each heart with spray adhesive and then sprinkled them with silver glitter. A couple of tips, I use the back of a magazine underneath my glitter projects. It is the perfect weight to pick up curl the edges and dump the excess glitter back in the container. I also use a sticky lint remover whenever I am using glitter. I buy them at the $ store and they work great for quick pickups.

On the hearts that have sayings I used an old paintbrush to carefully remove most of the glitter on the inside of the heart. Just leaving a border of glitter around the edges.

Now for the fun part. I love using power tools! Using a drill bit that is just a little bit bigger than your skewer or dowel drill holes in your block of wood. On second thought you really should drill the holes before you paint the block of wood. I used a marker to mark where I wanted my holes to be, keeping in mind that I wanted my hearts to have a staggered appearance. (sorry for the crappy photo but you get the idea)

Once your holes are drilled you can start arranging your skewers/dowels making them different lengths. Hotglue your skewers to the back of your dowels, and put just a dab of hotglue on the end of the skewer before sticking them into your drilled holes. Ta-Da! This project cost me $2.00 and was really easy to do. Fun too!