I love decorating for the holidays, and I mean all the holidays, not just Christmas. There’s something so fun about changing up your decor and making the house feel so festive. The only problem is that we live in a really small home so if I actually went as bananas as I wanted to for all the holidays, I probably wouldn’t have anywhere to sleep at night because of all the storage bins.
So, I limit myself to really going nuts for just a couple holidays…sigh. Christmas and Halloween seem to get the most attention but that’s a story for another day. Today I’m going to share with you how I do a bit of decorating for one of those small, “in-between” holidays without going too far off the deep end.
When I think about why I love to decorate, two things come to mind. The first is creating tradition for my family, the other is doing something that makes me feel all warm and fuzzy. Nothing puts a smile on my face like coming home after a long day of work, pulling up to the house and seeing a cheerful front door. So I decided the front entryway should be my focus if I was going to do any decorating. Since Valentine’s Day is right around the corner, I’m going to show you how I created a fun, festive coffee filter heart wreath for only $4.25.
I’ve been at the dollar store a ridiculous number of times this month for various other projects and whenever I was there, I eyeballed the heart-shaped metal wreath rings they have in the Valentine’s section. I was contemplating what I could do with them and one day, as I was organizing the girls’ crafts, I came across a bunch of coffee filters I bought for a chromatography science project. The lightbulb went off!
The project involved coloring the coffee filters with markers, placing them in water and letting the water separate the colors out. Afterwards we turned them into butterflies and I remembered thinking how pretty they were and how fun it would make flowers out of filters instead of just butterflies. It dawned on me that I could make a bunch of coffee filter flowers and make a cute Valentine’s Day heart wreath. Look how cute the flowers turned out!
I headed straight to the dollar store for the heart-shaped metal wreath ring and rounded up the remaining supplies I needed. Here’s a list of supplies I used:
I had food coloring on hand, but it was the fancy gel kind so it was a little difficult to dissolve into the water for dyeing. If I had to do it over, I’d definitely use the regular old liquid version. As for the thin cardboard, I pulled a soda box out of the recycling bin, but posterboard would also work really well. I cut the cardboard into a heart shape to match the wreath ring and glued it on so that I had a base to attach the filter flowers. You could just nix the wreath ring altogether and glue the flowers straight to the cardboard, but I like the dimension the metal ring gives the wreath since it’s curved upwards.
I’m not sure exactly how many coffee filters I ended up using because the pack I bought was used originally for the kiddos science project I mentioned. But a safe bet would be to buy a 200 pack. I’ve seen them for as low $1.25 at the grocery store but you might be able to find them even cheaper.
I love how the wreath turned out and it makes me so happy when I come home and see it on my front door. My porch is covered so it doesn’t get wet but if yours is open to the elements you might want to consider bringing it inside if rain is in the forecast.
This was so much fun to create that I kind of want to make another one for my bestie. What color do you think I should do next? Maybe one with multiple shades of pink and red?
