Having money to spend gives choices.  Sometimes having too many choices can make it harder to make a decision.  During our spending freeze, we have the ease of few choices :).  Example to follow:

We had to take down our Christmas decorations this month.  Sniff, sniff.  I didn’t get some of them up until December 23rd…..we were kind of slow.  So taking them down right away seemed too fast.  I wasn’t emotionally ready for Christmas to be over…..

…until I was.  Then I imagined red hearts everywhere and thought, “Why not take Christmas down and put some Valentine stuff up?”  Never mind that Valentine’s Day is 38 days away, or that we have never decorated for Valentine’s Day before.

Add that we are in a spending freeze and don’t have any decorations from previous years….because we don’t decorate for anything but Christmas.

I smelled a challenge.  Not to win a spot in Better Homes and Gardens….bwa ha ha ha….No.  What you are about to see definitely doesn’t rise to that level.  I just wanted to make the place feel festive for the kids.

I found a foam wreath form that used to have cotton balls hot glued to it.  It looked cute on pinterest, but it looked dumb when I did it.  So I pulled the cotton balls off and ended up a wreath form covered with hardened glue and fuzz.  It was too expensive to throw away and too ugly to sell at a garage sale so I put it in the pile that makes my office look really trashy.

I had a spool of pearl edged burlap ribbon left over from a wedding shower and wrapped the wreath.  My plan was to just wrap it up and hang it up…but I ran out of ribbon :(.  My first though was to run to the store and grab another spool.  At most it was going to be $2…..but spending freeze.

Not enough ribbon….so the remnants of glue and cotton balls still shows.

Aak.  So I looked around my office to see if I had anything red.  I found some long strips of polar fleece left over from a blanket project.

Without measuring I folded it over to be able to cut a semblance of a square

Rounded the edges

 Cut a spiral

And rolled it up (starting with the outside edge) to make roses.  At the end, the round part in the middle glued over the bottom to hold it all together.  Then I spent about 20 minutes making a bunch of them.  It went fast, because I didn’t measure anything. The un-uniformity of it all made a nice effect.

I love how it turned out!

I hung it in my entry over a piece of fake Ikea fur and a couple of candles.  This pic doesn’t do it justice…

 We found small bits of Valentine candy and thought to make centerpieces out of some Dollar Tree candle glasses I had on hand.  But the tiny amount of candy looked stupid.  And then the boys ate all the candy.  So we tried something else.

Black eyed peas with a votive nestled in. A scrap of burlap ribbon and a hand stitched felt heart.  It isn’t what we’ve always dreamed about as far as decorations go but it was 100% from stash and is a little bit festive.

To add to the festive, we added some of the same hearts to our Ikea plants over the stove.

These are my favorite.

If I can find some red construction paper, I’d like to make these.