I can't believe it's the end of January already!  Time goes by so fast, and I don't seem to get anything accomplished.  I probably won't get any crafting done any time soon.  :(

Hopefully it won't be long before I can start doing some gardening though.  We've had lots of warm weather lately.  (Although it's supposed to get cold again tonight and for the next couple of days.)  But February is just around the corner, and that means that the LFD (the Last Frost Date) is nearly upon us!

I wanted to make a valentine for Fred Flare's Valentine fundraiser.  (The fundraiser is a very nice idea put on by a cool store I've only just discovered, fredflare.com.  The proceeds from the sale of the handmade valentines that people send in will go to a local charity.)

I started looking online for ideas because nothing was really coming to me.  I found a couple - here and here (scroll down to the torn tissue paper heart) - and kind of merged them into one.

I cut and folded a white card stock card to fit a plain envelope that I had, then cut a heart shape out of the front.  Then I tore pieces of tissue paper into little bits and glued them over the front of the card, and trimmed away the excess.



Now I wasn't sure what to do on the inside of the card.  At first I planned to cut out a felt heart and stitch it inside somehow, but then I decided that the tissue paper front just didn't go with felt.  So then I hand-lettered "Happy Valentine's Day" inside with matching marker. 

My hand-lettering was not very good though.  (I really need to work on that!)  So I ended up printing out the words and embellishing them a little, then cutting them out and gluing them onto a white card stock heart just a little bit bigger than the heart cut-out on the front.

Next I glued more torn tissue paper to the inside in a heart shape, then glued the card stock heart on top of that.



The pictures are not the best but I just ran out of time to mess with the camera and the lighting!

Here are some gift tags that I made using scraps of Christmas wrapping paper and card stock.  I keep it simple, but you could go fancy with trim and glitter, etc. 

We've been putting all the Christmas stuff away, and these were the last few scraps of wrap that I salvaged. 

I'm in the process of making a bath mat from old bath towels.  Nobody has more old bath towels than I do!  I thought this project looked like an easy way to use a few of them up, and the end result looks pretty nice.  (I don't think they used old towels for the example in the picture though, lol!)

So I went to Hobby Lobby yesterday and bought the gridded matting.  Mine is 24 x 30" and cost about $3.  I started the project last night while we sat and watched football.  I started cutting an old towel and the first thing I noticed is that my lap was covered in towel fluff!  It seems like I'm going to be losing a lot of towel fibers to the vacuum cleaner.

Tying the strips onto the mat starts out easy (for the first row) but gets harder as you go along.  I was really tempted to skip a row but then the mat won't be as plush.  I tried using an inexpensive latch hook that I picked up when I bought the matting.  I thought I could use it to push the strips back up through the holes, but it's not working all that well.

What I've done so far does look nice however.  I'm using two colors - navy blue and a lighter blue.  I'll take some pictures later this morning and post them on Flickr.

Uh...  I really should get back in the crafting habit.  I don't know what happened.  I mean, I was busy around Christmas time, of course.  But I've had plenty of time since then.  I just can't seem to get started.

Maybe I just can't figure out which project to work on first.  I still want to make an owl for my granddaughter.  Or do I want to start out with a felt bird?  Or a cat?  Or some hearts for next year's Christmas tree?

See?  Too many ideas!  Tomorrow I will decide.

I am re-purposing my old, unused LJ blog into a Craft Blog. So now when I make something, I can post pictures to the Flickr Crafting 365 pool and blog about it!