Creatively Crafty, Handmade, Heartful, and Artful V-Day Gifts this Valentine’s!

Celebrate this Valentine’s Day by making your own DIY, heartful, holiday creations! Share from your heart and use your hands to craft homemade, handcrafted, heart-inspired gifts that lift moods and brighten spirits. Get creative and think outside the chocolate box! Don’t resort to run-of-the-mill, same ol’, same ol’, generic gifts everyone else is giving. If you want to give something more customized and creative than candy hearts, red roses, and boxes of chocolate, try making your own greeting cards, poems and songs, beauty and bath products, and lots more Valentine’s-y crafts that will make hearts happy! And, because our health and happiness go hand-in-hand, let’s celebrate with DIY chemical-free products and healthier sweet treats.

HEARTFULLY HANDMADE HOLIDAY CARDS

Opt for thicker paper, matte or glossy, like card stock, for your heartfully handmade greeting cards. Cut out construction paper hearts, glue them over a doily, and add Valentine’s-y stickers. Want to incorporate candy hearts? Use a glue gun to adhere heart candies with heartful messages. Make a Valentine’s montage with heart shapes cut out from magazines and catalogs, and add cutout letters to spell “l-o-v-e,” “h-e-a-r-t,” and “x-o-x-o.”

TAP INTO YOUR INNER PAINTER

Use watercolors or acrylics to express Valentine’s endearment and the concept of love visually. Your artwork doesn’t have to be one-dimensional. Make it a mixed media collage by gluing on other material. Ribbons, coins, leaves, pressed flowers, stamps, and jewelry can add to your piece. You can also incorporate words, phrases, and quotes into your artwork—handwritten, typed notes, or snippets from newspapers, magazines, catalogs, and even old books. Music lovers can tear or cut excerpts from sheet music or draw their own musical staff with treble and/or bass clef and notes.

ATTENTION: POETS AND SONGWRITERS

Poetry and songs are a romantic way of custom gift giving. Want to keep your poems short and sweet, but include more than one in a collection? Try a series of haikus. You can handwrite them and bind them together with string or ribbon. Want a version you can share online? Put it into a Word doc, PDF, or multimedia video and add your own voiceover and music. And, for the musically inclined, you can release your own recording(s) with a single, EP, or album, thanks to sites with which you can establish FREE accounts, like Bandcamp, Reverbnation, and Soundcloud.

BATH PRODUCTS THAT BEAUTIFY

Bubble baths can be fun and luxurious, but many kinds contain chemicals. So, for those of us chemically-conscious purists, try healthier options. Mix together equal portions of Epsom salts, baking soda, and sea salt. Stir in some essential oils. Spoon into small glasses or Mason jars. Top off with a cutout paper heart, punched with a hole and tied up with a ribbon, raffia, or yarn.

For a beautiful floral-herbal tea that’s totally caffeine-free, mix together any combination of dried pink rose petals and buds, dried lavender, dried peppermint, dried ginger, and dried chamomile, spoon into an empty tea bag filter, and seal closed. Steep, sip, and savor! Save some for an all-natural tea toner you can store in the refrigerator to refresh your skin. Spritz on after cleansing your face and follow with a natural moisturizer like olive, avocado, or coconut oil. You can also use these skin-soothing herbal blends as tea bath bags.

Sweet! Share the gift of softer skin with a sugar or salt scrub, easily made with coconut oil, sugar or salt, and essential oils.

FOR CHOCOLATE LOVERS, THINK OUTSIDE THE CHOCOLATE BOX!

If you want a more homemade touch for sweet treats than giving a standard box of chocolates, try dipping strawberries and/or almonds into chocolate. And, when the chocolate is gooey and melted, add in some orange zest for added yumminess.

Have a heartfully happy holiday this special Valentine’s Day! Do something unique and special this year for your loved ones and enjoy sharing these homemade gifts with the people you love.

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Susan B. B. Schabacker

Forsyth Magazines writer since 2018. Susan Schabacker was blessed to be adopted as a baby and made her journey from South Korea to Massachusetts where she arrived safely into her adoptive mother’s loving arms. She later moved to New Mexico and, after a few years, moved to Winston-Salem, NC, to study classical ballet at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts from the eighth grade through high school. Susan has lived in the Piedmont Triad area for nearly 20 years and had the opportunity to travel to Budapest, Hungary; London, UK; and Beijing, China, where she studied abroad through Elon University. In Stockholm, Sweden, she had a marketing internship at Hachette-Filipacchi, publisher of Elle and other magazines. She graduated with a B.A. in Corporate Communications and a minor in Dance from Elon University. Susan loves writing and is pleased to have written for Winston-Salem Journal’s "Teen Page," Triad Living, KernersvilleMagazine, and of course, Forsyth Mags. She is a co-author of a children’s book, Huckleberry Robin, based on a three-generation true family story. Susan is grateful for her faith, family, and friends and is happy and excited to be part of the Forsyth Mags team. She spreads the word about Forsyth magazines and enjoys reading and sharing them with her family and friends every month.

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