I am what my mother refers to as a “Holiday Junkie.” When a holiday comes close, she does everything she can to pull me away from Pinterest and hide my scissors and glue, because I go all. flippin. out. For Christmas, I did two advent chains- one with scriptures telling the story of Christmas each night, verse by verse, throughout various books of the Bible, and the other including activities that our family could do together, like dancing to Christmas music in the dark (only Christmas lights were on!) and making snowmen pancakes and Christmas tree waffles.

For Valentine’s Day, we decided to add to our paper snowflakes hanging from the ceiling by cutting out pink paper hearts. Zach loves to sit in the sunroom and watch the hearts and snowflakes twirl as the air current from the heater hits them.

I got another great idea for a craft, though, from one of my favorite blogs. Those of you who read my frequent reviews of Citrus Lane (LOVE them!) probably know I’m a huge addict when it comes to their blog, as well.

They posted a really cool craft in conjunction with Petite Lemon. And, all you need is a stapler, some strips of paper, and some scissors! (Well, and a printer helps, too). There’s virtually no cleanup involved!

Now, isn’t that adorable? You see why I absolutely had to do that craft, right? Especially because I love crafts, and I love holidays, and, well, you know how it is.

Even better, the cute papers included in the craft are on the Petite Lemon blog, FREE! I love the cute patterns that Petite Lemon has- truly inspired printables!

Petite Lemon printed theirs on cardstock, but we opted to print ours on plain printer paper. Either would work, honestly, as long as it’s foldable and flexible!

Petite Lemon’s patterns are SO cute, but for my craft, I decided to choose some patterns that fit our house a little bit closer… so I used a retired kit from Sweet Shoppe Designs, called When You Need a Friend. Sweet Shoppe Designs is an amazing site- if you’re a digital scrapbooker or use any digital and paper elements, this is a very high quality site. It’s one of two sites that I visit in digiland to get my supplies.

Anyway, back to the tutorial. I selected five papers from that kit of varying patterns and colors that I felt complimented each other. I used photoshop to crop the 12×12 papers down to 8.5×11 papers, and printed them out.

Then, I recruited Jeffrey and mom to cut the papers into strips, about an inch wide, so I had 5 pages of about 11 strips, that were 1×8.5.

Once the strips were cut, we folded each colorful strip in half, so it makes a point. Then, for the first heart, you gently turn the strips into the center, towards the point, so that way the patterned sides touch each other. I tried several times to get a good picture of this, but honestly, in our kitchen, there isn’t a ton of great light, so I just didn’t get a shot of it. If you head over to the tutorials I linked you to, they can give you a visual for this step!

Pick up another folded strip, and slip it onto the heart. Then, repeat the stapling process again, and BAM! Another heart. Do this again and again and you’ll eventually have a chain of hearts.

We tried to alternate our patterened papers in a sort of organized chaos- we didn’t want two of the same pattern together, but we also didn’t want the patterned papers to go in the same order every time. I just tried to randomly shuffle the patterns in.

And voila! It’s a chain! 55 links was too long for our large opening between our sunroom and kitchen, so we split the links between that opening and our big window opening between the office and kitchen… hearts everywhere!

I snapped a quick shot so you could see it in our home… I’m seriously hoping we can redecorate soon and get some better lighting! Yikes! It seems no matter how I adjust my camera, the lighting is still just… blah.

Anyway, that’s my quick and easy craft for today. If you can wield scissors and a stapler without inflicting too much damage, you can totally do it! Let the uncrafty among us rejoice!

Plus, you can totally use whatever papers you want to. You can head over to Petite Lemon and print theirs off. You can select a digital kit that matches your home or the season and print out papers from that. You can check your paper stash and see if anything is calling to you. Heck, you could take plain white paper and let your child draw and color all over it, then cut it into strips and hang it up that way.

 

Special thanks to Citrus Lane and Petite Lemon for the amazing project inspiration, and to Sweet Shoppe Designs!