Happy St Valentine's Day in our Home -2012

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,

Valentine Walnut Shell- small Tutoiral

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,
 

Valentine Ribbon Banner - small tutorial

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,
 

♥ Valentines Day 2011♥

On Tuesday we celebrated the Feast of St Valentine in our home. This is a family event mostly and we tried to have some fun food and activities.
As you can see our pockets in our family heart is stuffed, I took this photo early in the day and by the end of the day it was even more full of....love!

I have wanted to make these for ages, ( I had first seen it on Jessica's blog a couple of years ago) but until recently Oreo cookies were not widely available in Australia, and I really wasn't sure what they were.
Mostly on our feast days and special events we tend to try and give everyone a special activity to do. Rogan was so keen to do the dipping of the chocolate on the cookies and draw the hearts on with red gel icing. It really was a fun activity for him!

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 fire place.
I used ribbon from the $2 shop and just cut it to lengths and tied it on to a very long ribbon. I used pink, red and white ribbon to make this and pale pink and white sculpy. I worked on it over a few nights while spending time with the older children.
I actually think if used with different colours it could be used for birthdays or other celebrations too.

To cut out the sculpy shapes 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 backing them.
Thankfully Stephen and some of the older children kept an eye on them in the oven due to the fact I went to bed with Arwen and, um...well...I didn't get up again until morning.

Rogan made some place mats for our dinner table. Due to the fact that on Valentines Day we had no coloured paper except white we varied our plans and printed small heart images out form the computer and glued them on. Rogan then decorated around each heart image.
Great job Rogan, thank you.

My crochet and knitted heart banner that I was so keen to make was never actually made. I was distracted with other things, partly two series of books I have read over the last couple of weeks.
So when we visited Kendra's family on the weekend and I saw her beautiful banner over the arch way I knew that it was just the thing for us too.
although Kendra is a whizz on the computer and hers looks so professional I have no idea how to do what she does, so it is back to hand printing and decorating for the children.
Eden has a special ability to create beautifully decorated items and I love how she did the banner too.

Moran and Vellvin made valentine hearts for everyone to fill in for others, again no coloured paper so lots of colouring with textas and crayons. Thank you too girls

Of course Valentines day is not complete without books and I have always loved Tasha Tudor's pictures in these books especially.

Our bookcase display was put together by Autumn and me.
The Valentine tree was once again a big focal point in decorations, again with coloured in paper and some more ribbon.
Don't you love what you can do with ribbon?

What is this you may ask? Well as we had no St Valentine figure Autumn was very keen to pursue her idea of St Valentine being beheaded. So she looked around and came back with a doll's body I am part way through making along with a head for another project, combine that with a wooden chopping block some red wool and an axe from a knight and you have the Martyrdom of St Valentine.
Grisly but oh, so effective I think!

Corbyn and Myffwyn with their colouring pictures Charlotte's one of course and another one I found on the web (can't find the link now)

 

Moran and Rogan with their copies of the colouring pictures.
The younger children did this while we were finishing dinner preparations.
To keep in mind for next year Jessica has prepared two work sheets I will add to our collection.

St Valentine Wordsearch and St Valentine Crossword Puzzle

Thank you Jessica!

Autumn made a beautiful chocolate heart shape cake with pink peppermint icing and some heart chocolate sprinkles as well. It  was quite delectable!

Our main meal was simply heart shapes mini pizza's. Made form English muffins cut into heart shapes, BBQ sauce ham, black olives, tomato and cheese. Simple and quick.

Trying to keep the theme pink, red and white. We made pink milk added some whipped cream and chopped up strawberries. Another popular choice.

I had been saving these Love note candy's for a few months and almost forgot to put them out. The writing on each one makes them special for the kids, even if some of them aren't quite what they were looking to say. I got a few given to me that said, hug me etc.

Arwen was busy helping with the heart shaped coolie dough...her favourite part of the day.

The last item we made for the day was heart shaped cookies. Saxon made the dough and he and Eden and Arwen cut out the cookies. I added the jelly crystals at the last to give them a bit of colour and to avoid having to ice and decorate them at the end of a long and quite busy day.

I pray you each enjoyed your own celebrations for the day with the special people in your life.
Thank you for sharing in our celebrations by visiting here ♥

Blessings to you and your homes,