Valentine's Mantle 2013

Last year I blogged about my Valentine's Day Mantle. I view it now as a good first attempt. However, a year later, I have a much more cohesive mantle.

It still has some of the same features of last year, the heart centerpiece, colored candles, and the red heart plate. However everything else is new and/or re-purposed. 

This is the left side of the mantle. The vase filled with colored balls is the focus. I purchased them from Lowe's on clearance for a dollar a piece. They consist of purple, pink, red and white balls and a couple of spirals. I think they are a fun addition. I also have the red, pink and white candles from last year. The "rock" that is painted pink and says kiss and the heart shaped box are both from the dollar tree. The lantern is there to just add some depth, but is empty.

On the right side of the mantle you can see the love decoration I recently highlighted. I also have two apothecary jars here. The tall one on the left is filled with a red and white Christmas garland. The one on the right is filled with red Styrofoam hearts covered in glitter and silver Styrofoam balls that I have used in other decorations. Finally it is finished off with a heart decoration and another dollar store box.

Happy Valentine's Day!

Valentine's Love Decoration Tutorial

On Pinterest I have seen several Valentine's Day decorations with white backgrounds and colored decorations going from red to pink. I've seen it with the word love and with hearts. I happened to be walking through Michael's when I saw the word "Love" in the clearance bin. I immediately purchased three of them, and an appropriately sized canvas and hurried home to make decoration for my mantle. 

It is simple to make with a canvas, your selected decoration, paint, glue, and paint brushes. As you can see here I've got my canvas and love words. I already had the white spray paint, acrylic paint and paint brushes. The glue isn't shown, but it's just Elmer's glue. One of the things I really liked about having the whole word connected as opposed to the individual letters is it is much easier to get everything aligned.

I sprayed the canvas white just to give it a uniform look. Then I painted each of the love words a different color, one was red, one was peach and the second a mixture of a bright pink and some white to make it a little more muted. You can see how it turned out below as well as have a sneak peak of my entire Valentine's Day Mantle.