It's beginning to look a lot like....Valentine's?

This year I decided to leave the Christmas tree up for a while. And by a while I mean at least through Valentine's. We are creating our very first Valentine's tree. I put all the Christmas decor away early January and kept the tree. Now it has sat mostly bare this whole time, the poor thing. I've been searching for red twinkle lights, very much like the white ones at Christmas, but red. For some odd reason I thought these would be easy to find, but I was wrong. The only ones I've come across are these red heart-shaped plastic lights, string of 10 for $10 at Target. To saturate this tree in red lights, I'm going to need at least 5 of these string lights and I'm not about to fork out $50 for red lights. So it will have to do with the white lights left over from Christmas.

As you can see, the tree sits on a corner by the windows. I don't want the neighbors to think I'm THAT crazy, and I figured red lights would let passerbys know "Hey, I'm not crazy, just celebrating Valentine's". So I guess I'm gonna have to settle for crazy this year.
I know I can order them online here, but I need to decorate this tree now before Valentine's has come and gone AND I really don't want to spend money on this crazy idea of mine.

With the help of my trusty Cricut Expressions like the one found here, I got to work and whipped out these adorable Valentine's ornaments. They are so easy and add so much whimsy to the room. I first picked up several sheets of scrapbook paper at Michael's and Target. Mostly pinks, reds, some black &white, and lots of glitter and sparkles.  Also picked up a couple of rolls of Valentine ribbon that looks something like this, at Michael's for $0.50 a roll and at Target in the dollar section, for a whole buckaroo. My coworker was kind enough to let me borrow her Cricut Jukebox and oh what a treat! Take a look at one here. It holds a total of 6 Cricut cartridges at a time. You hook up the Jukebox to the Cricut Expressions, and rather than inserting a new cartridge everytime you want to switch, you simply press the corresponding button on the jukebox to access the one you want. She has several Valentine-y cartridges I don't have and so I borrowed them from her. Anywho. Here are the cute Valentine ornaments I whipped up last night.



For these I used the Designer's Calendar Cricut cartridge seen here to cut out the large hearts. Then simply matted one with the square cardstock, shaping the edge of the square one with Fiskar's paper edgers. Then used this Ek Success Paper Shaper folk heart punch to punch the 3 small hearts and adhered them with foam tape for a 3D effect. Hole punched some holes and strung the ribbon/tulle through them.

These hearts were cut using the George & Basic Shapes Cricut Cartridge, seen here. The owl and birdie were cutout with Winter Frolic Cricut cartridge seen here, heart punch for the 3 little hearts in each ornament, punched holes and slid the ribbon through them. The owl and birdie were adhered to the heart ornaments with foam tape for a  3D effect.

The scalloped heart, filigree heart and the LOVE sign and scalloped box were cut using Wedding Cricut cartridge seen here. I used glittery paper for these and I love the effect. Filigree was simply glued right onto the scalloped heart, hole punched at the top and ribbon slid through.
The LOVE sign was foam taped, for a 3D effect, to the scalloped box. Then I stapled the ribbon to the back using fucshia colored staples with my Close To My Heart stapler.

And here they are on the tree!

I'll make a few more ornaments to fill in some gaps and I'll call it a day for this year. Next year, we'll do more. My 9 year old, was very excited to see the tree this morning and declared to be happy that we're a funky family that loves celebrating, well, love.

Note: please forgive the quality of the pictures. My camera has broken on me and I'm taking these pictures with my not-so-great-quality-picture-taking cell phone.