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Well once again we had a feast day to celebrate. If it is one thing I enjoy about our Catholic Faith it is the absolute ability to make it special in the every day. Of course this means many feast days through out the year, celebrations of the Saints, those who have lived their lives for God in a way we can emulate. To balance this though we are given many opportunities to reflect and draw closer to God through abstinence, giving more of one self and sacrifice....Lent starts next week you know and I am pondering how best to apply the opportunities available to my self as well as a family 'gift'
Our celebrations were not spectacular or very food orientated and quite frankly the crafts I had planned for St Valentine were no where in existence.
However we did achieve a few ideas to help remember the life of St Valentine.
We had our Valentine  Walnut Shell gifts -- tutorial here courtesy of our Eden girl
This idea I am not really how to explain it but the clear plastic heart has everyone's names on heart shaped pieces of cardboard. What I was trying to capture was the heart of the family holding everyone's individual hearts  together in one special embrace. Kinda corny huh?
On our bookcase display (the whole St Valentine Display is in the first picture) I wanted to decorate the candle quickly so I cut out some of our candle decorating wax sheets(we have had these for some years and it has lasted quite well) so hearts of course are quick and simple to cut and apply to the candle.
Getting out our Valentines day books is a great pleasure as we usually add these Tasha Tudor books to our display as well.
I read aloud from  Saint Valentine, Love is....  and Little Acts of Kindness as the younger children coloured in these colouring pictures:
Colouring pages we used~
cut out card
Boy posting card
St Valentine - Charlotte ( I love this one)
St Valentine- illuminated ink
St Valentine and this one too
Boy and Girl
Boy and dog
Cute Bunny (our little girls loved this one)
Boy and girl holding hands

The vestments for St Valentine on Father Pine are red, this is the other end of our bookcase display.
We did set up our Valentines Tree that we have each year as well as our Heart Pockets. The ideas for this are explained in this post from last year
This year our lack of ability to get out and  get supplies fo rthis means we really only started this today and the little ones have been filling pockets with lots of pictures and love letters.  AS we only started today we will keep this circle of love going until the start of Lent.
Just the bookcase display, notice the untidy bookcase, I hadn't really until Eden so carefully  pointed out to me, thanks sweety.
For the All Seasons wreath I wanted to keep it simple so cut our multiple layers of both pink tissue paper and red cellophane and threaded them through with thread, fluffed them up a bit and put them on the wreath.
Simple yet effective I think!!
Of course we had to put up our Valentine Ribbon Banner
Arwen was fascinated by it this year and kept trying to tug at the sculpy hearts, she loved them so much.
Here is the "LOVE" banner that we put up for the first time last year. If you look carefully you can see the Valentine Ribbon banner and the Seasons wreath in the back ground of the room behind.
I was so impressed that Vellvin wanted to cut both eh carrots and chicken pieces into heart shapes. This took a long time to do but she was very diligent with it. I think they look so cute!
I love the way the hearts look on our dinner plate. We had the heart shape cake (pictured above) that Rogan made earlier, for sweets. Our heart shaped sugar cookies that Saxon was making (still in dough form today even....hmm when can we have these Saxon?)

That pretty much wrapped up our celebrations for the day. I hope you enjoyed your own day as well.

Prayer t St Valentine -
O glorious advocate and protector,
St Valentine,
look with pity upon our wants,
hear our requests,
attend to our prayers,
relieve by your intercession the miseries
under which we labour,
and obtain for us the divine blessing,
that we may be found worthy to join you
in praising the Almighty for all
eternity: through the merits of
Our Lord Jesus Christ.

Blessings to you and your homes,

I thought I would share this very quick idea we had for St Valentine today.

This was a quick 'what can we do with the supplies we had at home' so we can have a little gift for our memory boxes that we have each Feast Day
SUPPLIES~
walnut shells
narrow ribbon in various colours
tissue paper in various colours
red cellophane
coloured cardboard
Eden who was my hands for this today, it was my idea but Eden put it together  for me as I attended to other activities. Start by gluing the tissue paper to some cardboard.  Then cut out tiny heart shapes from this patchwork of colours.
Taking a small piece of cellophane, put it into the bottom of one half of the walnut shell
Then simply place your coloured hearts on top. You can decorate them or write messages or simply leave them plain as we did today
Place the other half of the walnut shell on top and tie with ribbon colour of your choice
Easy, so very easy!

Give to a loved one with a note of love!

Blessings to you and your homes,
 

Here is a small tutorial on a Valentine Ribbon Banner I made last year for those of us considering what we might make for this St Valentine's Day. I hope you enjoy looking at this very simple craft.

As part of our decorating I had made a ribbon banner with sculpy love hearts.
I don't think it photograped as well as it could have. It really looks very lovely and spans the entire fire place.
I used ribbon from the $2 shop and just cut it to lengths and tied it on to a very long ribbon. You can use whatever width you desire and mix up the style and colour of ribbons for added effect.

for the long foundation ribbon I just used one of the ribbons I had bought, but you could easily use a crochet chain or finger knitted chain too. I used pink, red and white ribbon to make this and pale pink and white to create the sculpy heart. I worked on it over a few nights while spending time with the older children, although it really is a quick project the baking of the sculpy (or fimo) is the most time consuming part.
I actually think if used with different colours it could be used for birthdays or other celebrations too. If fact I am about to start making one now, for St Patrick's day.
To cut out the sculpy shapes, first roll out to the desired thickness then  I used two of our heart cookie cutters and cut the smaller one from the larger shape, thus having a heart with a hollow looking center and a whole heart. I poked a hole in the top with a skewer prior to baking them.

Let them cool before stringing up but still be careful as they are a little fragile.

Tie them on to your long  ribbon string in the desired places you want them to be. In fact due to the easy construction of this project you can take items off and put them on in different orders to please your eye at any time, thus making it multi purpose if you desire.

Enjoy your crafting and please let me know if you make one of these too!

Blessings to you and your homes,