Valentine's Day Decor Under $2

I'll admit, I've never been that into Valentine's Day. In fact, I never really celebrated or acknowledged the day until I met my boyfriend, so I certainly never decorated for it. This year was going to be no exception because I honestly didn't want to spend money on buying things to decorate the house for a one-day holiday. Valentine's day isn't like Halloween, Thanksgiving or Christmas, really; there is no build up to the holiday and there is no "season" in which to enjoy it, i.e. "the Christmas season."

However, the craft and DIY version of Cupid struck me one night and I decided that I would really like to decorate a little, but only if I could use items I already had. I did end up spending a $1.60 but I still considered it a win. I didn't create anything fancy, but it was just enough to add some color and a little bit of a fun spirit to our house.

If you decide to challenge yourself to use what you already have, what you come up with will probably be different than what I came up with, but this is just to encourage you to be creative!

A few of the things I gathered up were two shiny, plain red Christmas gift bags (I've always thought they were too boring to give a gift in so I was happy to get use of them), letter stickers, the bottom of a gift box (the white cardboard on top of the bags), a pink vase, printables I found online (highly recommend doing this) and napkins that I bought for something else.

I decided to make vertical heart garland strands so I cut open the gift bags and traced my heart stencil I cut out from a free printable. You could also use a heart cookie cutter or anything else similar.

Then, I cut out the small pink and tan hearts I printed out from online and I assembled my garlands by alternating the different sizes and colors and fastening them with a piece of tape. Later I went back and glued on hearts to the backsides so that when they spin around you won't be looking at a white heart with tracing marks on it :)

I also added two really long medium-width red and white ribbons from Christmas and  hung them from the window. I really like hanging things like this around the window because the windows are so plain and boring otherwise. If you've been reading my blog for a while you would know already that we agreed (I reluctantly agreed) that we wouldn't bother with curtains because we knew this wasn't going to be our permanent home.
 For these projects, what costed me money was the heart napkins ($1) and 2 small bundles of white string that were 30 cents each. There are so many ways you can dress these garlands up even more, for example, making the hearts out of felt, or using little pompoms in-between the hearts, but like I said, I was trying to do this for as close to free as possible! I ended up making enough to hang on the window in the kitchen as well.

The last thing I made was the little door hanger that I hung from the pantry door in our kitchen. Just a brief rundown of what I did:
1. Took the cardboard bottom of a second Christmas bag and used that as the base.
2. Cut out enough of the bag to cover the cardboard base and glued it around.
3. I used the glittery Christmas ribbon as decoration for the top and also added the red ribbon through the "knot" backing of the gold ribbon. The red ribbon that it hangs from came from the handles of the Christmas bag- I wasn't throwing anything out!
4. I used an extra red heart I had leftover from the previous project, cut out another heart with a pair of scalloped edge scissors from card stock and glued those together and onto the bag.
5. Lastly, I used the sticker letters and spelled out love to go over the top.

My boyfriend's birthday is the day before Valentine's Day, which is why I didn't want to go overboard with Valentine's decorations... I'm not going to take them down on his birthday and then put them back up again! So, the last little things I did were using one of the heart napkins to make a little "coaster" for the candle- really just to add a little color to the area and I printed out the heart picture and put it in the frame to add to the love theme in a subtle way!

If you want this printable for yourself, you can find it and others here!

Overall, I'm happy with the way these little DIY projects turned out and I'm even happier that I was able to repurpose a few items I already had, only spend an extra $1.60 and spend an afternoon crafting :)

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