watercolor heart garland whimsy

I am so so SO excited to be sharing the FIRST guest post on This Idyllic Life tonight!! Meet my friend, Taurie, and enjoy her DIY post for Valentine’s Day. 🙂 While you’re at it, make sure you make it a habit to check out her other adorable, light, and real musings at Eye Love You Blog. She also has one of the prettiest Instagram feeds EVER {@eyeloveyoublog}. I just love this girl. xoxo, SHANNA

Hi everyone!  I’m Taurie from Eye Love You Blog and I’m so excited to be guest blogging today!  With Valentine’s Day coming up next month, I thought I’d pop in and share a super easy DIY craft to “festify” your home 🙂

Check out these soft, whimsical watercolor heart garlands.  It’s okay.  I’m in love with them, too.

What you’ll need:

• Regular old computer paper
• Watercolors
• A computer/printer
• Photo stickers/glue stick
• Baker’s twine
• Washi Tape or something to hang it when you’re done

I started by painting five sheets of computer paper with my new watercolors.  I used whatever colors I liked and mixed them together on the page in different strokes and patterns.  It really doesn’t matter how it looks when it’s done, just as long as the colors are pretty… because we’re going to cut them up in a minute, anyway 😉

Then I opened a word document and inserted 12 clipart hearts onto a page so that it looked like this: (I just copied and pasted each heart to make sure they were all the exact same size)

I put my dried watercolor paintings into the printer with the backside up so that it would print on the back and not the front.

I cut each heart out and paired them with another heart that had a similar color scheme, so that when the heart flutters around on the garland, it looks related, but not identical on both sides.

To stick each pair of hearts together, I used photo stickers, like the kind you would use for scrapbooking.  I ran them down each heart in a Y-pattern so that both “wings” of the heart would stick together and so that the baker’s twine would have something to keep it centered.

On each garland I had seven hearts, but that could vary depending on how long you want each one to be.  I hung them from the ceiling using my go-to décor tool:  washi tape.  They really look so pretty hanging in my dining area… I might just have to find a permanent home for them after Valentine’s Day is over 🙂

 The whole thing probably took me about an hour to complete.  Two if you count cleaning up the watercolors and waiting for the pages to dry.  It was a fun, easy afternoon project and I’m so happy with the way it turned out!Thank you to my dear friend, Shanna who invited me over today!