sewn with love

Happy Valentine's Day! 

I hope y'all are passing around some love to your friends and family and eating plenty of chocolate. 

But let's get to the good stuff, the crafting.

This year Ashley and I were into sewing some of our valentines.  

Here's what you do:

Sketch what you want to sew onto the card and then take a needle and poke holes around it like so:

Then start sewing with some embroidery thread.  After pulling the thread through the front of the card, loop it back through the previous hole for a smooth line.  Kind of like this:

Ta-Da!

It takes a bit of time, but it's pretty adorable.

I failed to get a picture of the mass of our valentines, but it was a pretty similarly sized pile to last year.

Also, we found this valentine mask, so of course I had to get it and then color it for a certain someone.

I know, flipping amazing! Who doesn't want a cat-in-a-bow-tie-mask-valentine???

xoxo

sweet hearts

it's time for a little love. so i made a valentine's garland to add some festive to the house.

I'm a big fan of felt garland because it's pretty much the easiest thing to make.

Just cut up some felt in your desired shapes and colors and then sew them together onto some embroidery thread or yarn.

I cut up hearts, birds, x's, and o's: 

I sewed the thread to the backside of my felt pieces in my preferred order:

And ta-da, my garland was complete: 

I made it a bit long so I pinned it up in three places to scallop it like so:

Now we have some sweet hearts in the place!

(hehe, get it?)

And yes, Ashley and I have already made all our valentine's this year, pictures on those after they've been received.

Hope you are crafting some of your own!

xoxo

valentine's day? oh you mean arizona day?

Yes it was Valentine's day recently, which really means nothing really.  Except when you date a boy from Arizona, and then it means Arizona Day... Unfortunate for a California girl I know.

But I dealt with it. And made cookies. Martha's Mexican Hot Chocolate Cookies actually. 

Follow the recipe, they are delicious, the only things I would note are that you need to push the dough balls down before you bake them and for an added kick put a little shake of cayenne in the rolling sugar.  The heat is nice, very faint and just makes for an extra tasty chocolate snicker-doodle, basically. 

The process: 

Well then I had to decorate them of course! I just whipped up some royal frosting (using meringue powder) and tried to make it as red as possible. And went to town trying to be as inspired by my neighbor state as possible...

I feel like my AZ outline isn't all bad, right?

xoxo

be mine?

happy valentine's day!

Share the loves and the hugs. 

You need 4-12 a day depending on your goal (survival, maintenance, or growth), so hug it up!

oh yeah, we made some valentine's, because we're cute like that.

oh and today is the perfect excuse to eat a metric crap ton of chocolate and not feel bad about it.

um, and check out pinterest for some adorable valentine's ideas of the card and cookie nature. 

xoxo