Snow Day: Valentine's Day Crafts

[Pardon the quality of some photos. During some of this, my camera's battery was dead and I used my phone.]

Well, I got a little antsy yesterday. The boy is just fine lounging around watching movies, but I've always got to be doing something, whether it's playing online, folding laundry or crafting.

So, since he wanted me to watch movies with him, I got to searching around online for some projects which I might have the stuff for. I wanted to make some more Valentine's Day decor, so I went started looking around and stumbled on this post with lots of great ideas and was inspired by this one. It seemed like it'd be the most possible without a run to the store.

The thing is: I wanted a little color on mine. I knew where it'd be hanging and thought color would look best.

So, the wheels started spinning. Remember how I was so productive on the first snow day? Well, there are still two trash bags of clothes waiting on me to give away/donate (which, I haven't been getting out in the ice, so that'd be hard to do). There's LOTS of color in those bags I thought. So, I started digging, and ended up with this:

Lots of color, right? Then, I started working on bending a hanger.

 Then, Baxter decided he needed some attention. 

 But, I had things to do! I started cutting the shirts into little strips.

 That is, until the boy (whose mom is a seamstress) showed me a much easier way to do that... so I put him to work.

 And he created this handy little pile for me.

 And I got to work tying.

 And I kept tying until I got around the entire heart.

 Then, it was time to hang it up. I had originally envisioned hanging it up discreetly where you couldn't see any strings or anything. But, I couldn't find anything that would work to hang it where I wanted. The boy pointed out to me that one of the shirts that I cut up for the heart had strings on it (see picture above of shirts before cutting), and I thought that'd be super cute, so I used it.

Then, the more I looked at my cute little colorful heart, I thought it looked lonely... it needed something else up there with similar colors. So, I asked Leslie what I should do. She sent me this cute picture of what someone did to these frames as well as this tutorial and this one.

Now, I didn't exactly have all of the materials in those... so the wheels began spinning again. I would cut up the shirts some more for the twisting fabric, but what about the base behind it?

Remember, on that first snow day, lots of people came over? Well, those people drank quite a bit of beer... and we hadn't completely thrown everything away yet. So, I found this....

What about circles? Well, the boy has lots of drawing stuff for school (think compass), but didn't want to go get his backpack out of his car in the freezing weather. So, he looked in the kitchen for round objects in different sizes:

Isn't he so handy? So, I got started. I hot glued the end of the fabric to the (estimated) middle of the round cardboard.

... then twisted and twisted and twisted. I hot glued quite a bit throughout.

Aren't they cute?

So, using scotch tape, I attached the rosettes the the corners of my frames which were already there. I used that so they could easily come off when it's no longer Valentine's season.

This was my "fantle" once everything was assembled.