Create it- diy Valentine's Day

Valentine's day is less than a week away...here are a few easy gift ideas! These are things I have done for various holidays since we have been together, so these ideas can work for anniversaries or birthdays too.

Customized Coffee Tumbler:

My boyfriend loves coffee, so I bought a coffee tumbler that you could customize. I bought different types of paper from the craft store and printed out pictures to create a personalized collage.

One Year Of Memories Book:

I glued 12 (one for each month of the year) envelopes together to make an accordion-style fold out book. I wrote down a memory from each month and added pictures from that on the outside of the envelope. This one is definitely a little more time consuming, but worth it.

Our Map:

I used pencil, markers and water colors to create a customized map. It actually took my boyfriend and I seven years to finally get together, so I focused on the path to get to each other, but this can be adjusted to your year together, to your engagement or when you first met.

Happy Valentine's Day!!!

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Create it- Indoor Drive-In Movie Night

Fun activities to do with my nieces seem rather limited during the winter, but I really wanted to do something cool for them when my boyfriend came for a visit a few weeks ago. With just a bit of planning and extra work we were able to take family movie night to the next level and make an indoor-outdoor drive-in movie theater.

Cost: $10 for all the paper and movie-style boxed candy.

Needed: Christmas lights, cardboard boxes, glitter paper, black paper, markers, glue and scissors.

The Marquee Sign: The hardest part of the whole thing was creating a marquee sign using cardboard.

I used a sheet of card board and cut out letters and covered them with black paper. I poked holes through a large piece of cardboard and then through the letters. I stuck the Christmas lights through both holes and allowed each letter to stand off a bit for the back piece- creating the marquee effect.

Outdoor Theater: My boyfriend took the girls on a freezing hike to collect large branches to create our 'outdoor' setting with trees. They had no idea why they were dragging branches to the house, but they had a good time getting outside for a bit. Later, we lined the branches along all of the walls to give it the forest effect and strung Christmas lights along the ceiling to make our stars.

The Little Things: Little touches like decorating the inside of the cars and a concessions stand with movie-style candy, brought the whole thing together!

The Cars: We folded the boxes, added some glittery paper for headlights/tail lights, custom license plates and added some cozy pillows and blankets for the perfect movie seats. There are plenty of tutorials ranging from simple to complex available online to help create a car out of a box, but we kept it pretty simple.

We requested the girls play in their room for a little bit while we set up their special surprise and we quickly put all the pieces together. Add a good movie and popcorn or pizza, and you have a cozy family movie night- with a fun twist. create-it