I had a very difficult time taking our holiday decorations down this year. They usually make their appearance between Veteran’s Day and Thanksgiving, and the rule is they get to stay up until at least my birthday which is the beginning of January. This year, though, they were still up until nearly the end of January.
It seems to me that my hesitance was due in part to my super-cute daughter and her love for all that is holiday decoration. She still asks from time to time where the “Spiders” are, and then tells me with authority that they are sleeping (for information the spiders are some fuzzy plush toys that decorated our apartment at Halloween and which the Guppy just adored to the point of sleeping with them when we let her).
The second reason is I’m feeling a bit homesick. I haven’t had a real holiday with my family since December of 2002 (the operative word being my family, because we have indeed spent the holidays with members of Mr. Fish’s family). Somehow by leaving the tree and tinsel up, well, the hope that I’d be home for christmas was still in an admittedly rather sentimental and cheesy way, alive.
But whatever the reason, his heart or his shoes…uh, I mean the Guppy or my missing my family, the decorations had to come down. People were beginning to notice our décalage with the rest of the world, so it was time to move on, yet, as I was boxing up and tucking away I saw the void I was leaving, and wanted to do something…
I actually got the idea to make the felt hearts as Valentines for friends and family members when I was making these adorable cupcake-tree orniments for our holiday tree, an idea which came from this great blog called Bittersweet (and no, I’m not simply a fan because we have the same theme for our blogs!). Ms. Hannah seems like a very talented chica who must not sleep much, but anyway, she shared this great idea for the cupcakes, and being a tempered cupcake fan, I threw together some felty-cakes for our tree and they were really cute. It was the first time I’d done anything vaguely ‘crafty’ since my late teens, and they were so fun and easy I got to thinking about how cute some felty-hearts could be.
After doing a quick search on Google for heart patterns, I printed out a few and bought some felt at my local mercantile and there you go. The red on white heart is really the cutest I think, though it’s difficult to tell with the grainy photos.
I have made some various little hearts to send out as Valentines using different color combinations like red on pink with multi-colored sparkles, pink on red with white…once I get them all done I’ll probably get some photos up. If you are not terribly sewing-inclined, really, this is a simple and fun project that anyone can do (before doing this the most sewing I’d ever done was attaching my ribbons & elastics to my points & ballet slippers!).
Musings From The Fishbowl 
