Valentine’s Day, the winter holiday that warms our hearts and puts us into a sugar coma. Just kidding, sort of, but seriously, Valentine’s Day used to make me cringe, but now I love it. I love making my husband and daughters valentines and helping my youngest write up her valentines for class. It’s the holiday that can sneak up on some of us, but I hope this post gets your creativity flowing and thinking about Valentine’s Day a bit earlier than usual. This year I’m putting together a Valentine’s tea for my family – it will be simple, short, and sweet. And I’m hosting a little Valentine DIY and dessert for some friends. In this post, I’m going to share some of the Valentine paper crafts that I’m doing, and I hope they inspire you as well.

Our dining room is the party space for both Valentine’s events, so I focused my decorating on this space. After clearing out the existing decor, I used the blank canvas to stack my books into a heart shape. I’ve seen this done before and loved it, but it was challenging. The key is to stack the books on their sides. I used my rolling cart shelves to help separate the books into smaller areas for the heart, otherwise the stack could get pretty heavy and tipsy. For my shelves, I needed a lot of books, and luckily, I had them. It’s not a perfect heart, but it’s so charming to me and I love the free decoration! You can also see how I made this faux heart topiaries on Instagram!

After the books were arranged, I added some decor to the top shelf, but it still seemed a bit plain. My plan is to add some faux flowers to the vintage apple baskets, but we’ll see if Hobby Lobby has a good enough sale. I originally imagined a bunting with vintage bird cutouts holding each end, but the rolling cart is so large as well as the heart-shaped books that a dainty bunting wasn’t going to cut it. So, I leaned on an oldie but a goodie and changed it up. I love the affordability of coffee filters, and that you can dye them, sew them, bunch them, scrunch them, so many possibilities, so I grabbed my Dollar Store coffee filters and tried a sewing method to make a fluffy ruffly bunting. To my surprise, my first attempt worked and the 300 filters in the package were the perfect amount. You can see the how-to video here on Instagram.

To start the invitation design, I opened Canva.com and began to create a mini postcard invitation. The wonderful thing about Canva (besides being free) is that I can customize the size of my document, the size of the postcard image, the colors, everything about the text, and more. I started with a postcard image (found in Canva), then made six copies and customized the address area for each friend invited to the DIY dessert. Then I created the event details on the other side of the postcard. I found a cute image of a vintage stamp and added it to each postcard as well. Then I printed all six images on one piece of paper. I used regular printer paper which is pretty thin, so to make it more durable and fun, I stuck self-adhering felt to the backside of the paper postcard printout. You can see the steps in my Instagram video here, including adding a little loop of string to make it easy to pull out the invite. I found a free envelope template online, printed the template then traced it six times onto my cardstock of choice to make these cute envelopes. Then I made the fun enclosure and the name added to the front side.

I stumbled upon making this next paper craft, but it’s so fun, easy, and cheap to make. When looking for vintage images of birds, I found this fun image on TheGraphicsFairy.com and inserted it into Word, sized it, copied it six times in the Word document, and printed it on cardstock. Then I cut out each one, added a wax seal into the circle, and made it the focal point of my napkin wrap using a paper doily. So simple, but such a fun and cheap detail to elevate a party or event.

I hope you’ve enjoyed these easy and doable Valentine paper crafts. I mentioned that I’m inviting friends over for a Valentine DIY and dessert, and the DIY craft will be coming up soon on the blog. It’s the sort of craft that deserves its own post, and it’s a paper craft that’s easy, fun, and affordable as well. It also has a vintage spin, no surprise there. I hope you’ll subscribe to receive my free email with my DIY, crafts, decorating, and party blog posts. Thanks so much for checking out this post!