A Simple Kind of Life: DIY Valentine Decor Week

I've decided to devote this entire week to showing you made some DIY Valentine Decor I made for our house.

I mentioned to you all before that I don't decorate for holidays. Ever. I didn't even have a Christmas tree put up the past two years. I've vowed that this is the year I'm going to change. Now, I'm not going to go crazy and decorate for every single, minor holiday. Baby steps. I did decide to start off my 2012 resolution of holiday decorating with Valentine's Day.

February 14th holds a special place in my heart and it's not because of Valentine's Day. It just so happens to be my sweet hubby's birthday. We have this ongoing battle every year because I refuse to acknowledge Valentine's Day and Jordan refuses to acknowledge his birthday. (Well he chooses to celebrate it on a different day so he can do Valentine's the way he feels it should be done.) In the end he usually wins.

Anyway, I decided to channel my inner romantic, acknowledge Valentine's Day this year, and dive into some homemade DIY decor. I did try to keep my decor a little mellow and more my taste as I'm not crazy about covering my house in every shade of pink and having a ton of mis-matched decor. I started with neutral palettes, then added pops of dark red and just a few pinks. I relied on some vintage accents like lace and old book pages as well as some natural elements like jute rope. I wanted my decor to flow and sort of have a theme, rather than be bright and sporadic and have no real connection to each other. All of my decorations in one way or another tie to each other.

Part of easing myself into the decorating groove, I decided to decorate one room in our house. Above is just a shot of our dining room where you can see some of the decor I created over the past few weeks. I'll give you all a closer look as the week progresses as well as a few other crafts you can't see in this shot.

My first DIY project is a yarn wreath I made for our front door.

I've seen lots of yarn wreaths all over the internet and decided to give it a try and make one myself. It seemed simple enough to create and easily customizable when it comes to colors and decorative accents.

Supplies Needed:

- yarn (colors and number of yarns your choice)

- foam ring from craft store

- decorative embellishments (I chose felt)

- glue gun

- lace (or some other material) for hanging

I found these two yarns at Michaels. A dark red and silvery-gray. The yarns actually look a lot brighter in the below pictures. The picture above of the finished wreath on our front door is a more accurate shot of the yarn colors. I also purchased a 15" foam ring. These too can found at your local craft store. There are also pre-made wreaths made of straw and wrapped in plastic, but I felt that the foam would be smoother and easier to work with.

I started the wreath by tying a simple knot with the yarn on what I decided would be the back side of the wreath, and began wrapping,

and wrapping,

and wrapping.

When the red was about 3/4 of the way done, I tied off and started wrapping the gray yarn from the opposite side of the ring. I did a large chunk of gray yarn, then went back to the red and continued to the end where the red meets the gray.

As I finished wrapping the red, I left the last few inches a little loose so I could move them easily and wrap the grey yarn between chunks of the red. I did this pattern kind of randomly and just wrapped where I thought it looked best, no real rhyme or reason. I wanted the gray spots to be varying widths and only in a small section of the wreath.

TIP: I wrapped my yarn pretty tightly around the foam ring. I also made sure to keep each piece of yarn right next to the previous one and not let them overlap at all. That was just a personal preference and you can overlap if you want. I've seen it done both ways and both look great.

Once finished the front (left) and back (right) looked like this:

Now comes the fun part where you get to decorate the wreath. While I chose to use felt and lace, you can use whatever you like i.e., pre-made flowers, create your own heart shaped accent piece, or use other materials such as fabric, book pages and even crepe paper to decorate with.

I decided to use felt to create small ruffles. When making these ruffles I used the same method I used when making my pom poms for Lucy's nursery.

I cut several circles out of white felt, about two inches in diameter.

I repeated this process several times until I had about 10 or so premade ruffles.

Using the glue gun I attached the ruffles to the wreath, keeping them close together.

Once the ruffles were all attached, the last step was to use some lace and wrap it around the top of the wreath to use when hanging. I bought two spools of two different laces for $1.00 each at AC Moore a few weeks ago.