Valentine’s Day Advent Banner

This post initially appeared last year as a guest post on Tip Junkie. I’m happy to share it with you here this year! You’ve got plenty of time to make a banner before February gets here!
 Young children have a hard time understanding time. My 3 year old has a hard time understanding why everyone else has to have a birthday before she can have another one. It’s always helpful to have a way to physically mark the time leading up to an anticipated event. But as with my Christmas advent calendar, I don’t believe that my children always need candy and presents daily in order to do it.  I decided to come up with a Valentine’s countdown or advent calendar that might help them remember to be more loving during the first 14 days of February.  It also serves as a cute decoration for my mantle!
I started with these inexpensive heart doilies I found on clearance at Target after Valentines last year.
My 9 year old helped me stitch up the bottoms of two hearts put together. We used thick embroidery floss and a large needle, to stitch through the existing holes in the hearts, securing the thread on the backside with large knots.  This makes little pocket.
Then I simply used hot glue to attach the heart pockets to a wide pink taffeta-textured ribbon. The numbers were cut out of vinyl with my Silhouette.
I overlapped the edges a bit while gluing so the garland wasn’t too enormous for my mantle.

 

I then wrote and designed heart-shaped inserts to go in each day.  The inserts are written in rhyme with a LOVE-themed challenge for the day. Hopefully, as a family we will take that challenge and perform that task during that day.  Here are a few examples:
Roses are red
Violets are blue
On the 1st day of Valentines
Tell someone special, “I love you!”
On the 4th day of Valentines
Write a LOVE letter
And give it to someone special
To help them feel better
Love they neighbor!
Think of someone on your street
On the 7th day of Valentines
Take them a special treat.

 

 I’m including my inserts here.  Click on them to see them full-sized. Save them to your computer and print them out on 8 1/2 x 11 cardstock and cut them out. You can insert them in your own garland, or maybe just hide one each day for the kids to find each morning of the countdown.

 

And here is my garland as part of my Victorian Valentine’s Day mantle.
I’m *almost* ready to decorate for Valentine’s Day this year! Stay tuned for this year’s mantle…
Do you do anything to countdown to Valentine’s Day? I’d love to know!

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Comments

  1. This is such a fun idea to do for Valentine’s Day. I love the little poems inside each one. Would you be willing to link this up to my Valentine Link Party going on now? I’d love to have your amazing creativity! http://michellepaige.blogspot.com/2012/01/rockin-valentine-valentine-link-party.html

  2. This is so cute! I have been looking high and low for just the right banner idea to make and send to my mom ~ my parents just purchased a new town house and my mom now has 2 mantles to decorate and she is beside herself with excitement, but still looking for ideas. I am going to make this for her and send it to her to decorate with 🙂 Thanks for sharing this super cute idea!

    • Oh, good! Have you found the doilies, yet? I was afraid they might not still be available, but I just saw some in my grocery store, so hopefully they aren’t hard to find.

      I’d love to see how the mantle(s) come out!

  3. This is absolutely GORGEOUS! Would love for you to stop by and share it at the Tuesday To Do Party this week!
    Smiles!
    Jami
    http://www.blackberryvine.blogspot.com

  4. Love it! I hope you will come by and Link Up to the I Heart Projects Party I am having on my blog.

    http://www.itsybitsypaperblog.com/2012/01/i-heart-projects-linky-party.html

  5. This is adorable! I love the idea of doing a countdown for Valentine’s Day! I found you through Today’s Creative Blog. Thank you for sharing! 🙂

  6. What a lovely idea, I’m really missing our Christmas decorations so would love to make something like this to make the house feel ‘fun’ again!

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Trackbacks

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