February Pinterest Project: Paper Heart Garland

I love Pinterest. Did you know that? Oh, you did? Well, just thought I'd say it again. Pretty fitting statement for this project, anyway!

I finally went to town on this months project, and I just {heart} how it turned out! Here is the original pin that I saw (which is originally from here):

Source: duitang.com via Nicole on Pinterest

And yeah, not sure what happened to the rest of the pin. Oh well, you get the gist. Anyway, it looked super simple and was soooo cute, I decided to try it!

Not too bad, eh?

It was super easy, and all the instructions you need are right in the pin - if only it would show up in this post! Oh well, you can go to my Valentines board to see the whole thing and see how it all goes together.

While I was there, I saw this pin as well:

Source: etsy.com via Nicole on Pinterest

That image is originally from Etsy, but the listing was gone, so I'm not sure who to give credit to. Anyway, I saw that pin in passing, but while I was creating my heart garland, I decide to come up with my own variation of it to match!

Here's how mine went together:

I cut even strips of newspaper and red construction paper.

I folded each in half. Then I took a strip of newspaper and folded it over a thread (to hang it with later).

This is the srip that will be on the outside of the heart, so you may want to pay attention to what it says, haha!

Then I put a strip of red, another strip of newspaper, another of red and a last one of newspaper over the first strip.

At this point, they are all folded over each other, so I just stapled them together on the fold, just like I did with the heart garland.

And again, just like the heart garland, I brought each layer of paper down to create a heart, only this time, instead of just having the one strip, I fixed each layer (newspaper, red, newspaper, etc.) so that it formed different sized hearts inside each other. Clear as mud?

So I ended up with this:

Then I trimmed the "tail" off (although a variation of the "tail" might be cute as well) but I left a little overhang on the top layer:

And used that to fold over the raw edges, making everything nice and clean, and stapled it all together (making sure to get every strip in the staple!)

Ta-da!

I love how it turned out! Its amazing what just a glimpse of an image on Pinterest can spark! And if we store these where they won't get squashed, we should be able to use them again next year.

So now let me answer your question as to why I am telling you about this way after Valentines Day. :) Its because I used all of this to decorate for our Valentines Supper at church tomorrow night! So here is what my beauty looks like hanging in the windows of our church basement:

Yessiree, gotta love that nice sun-shiny weather we've been having. *cough*

Here are some of the other decor items we pulled out of storage:

In the bottom left-hand corner of that last picture you can see a little bowl of cinnamon hearts... an easy decor item! I actually picked those up today for a whopping $1...that is the great part about having a Valentines event after the actual day, we can be all cheap sneaky like that.

Aww shucks, their kissing. :) Oh, and look...aren't those my nice candles from last year? Still looking as great as they ever did!

So there you have it... my Pinterest project for the month and some Valentine decor all wrapped into one. How do you decorate for V-day? Any DIY projects going on? I'm quite proud of myself for doing V-day inspired DIY projects two years in a row...thats got to be some sort of record!