Valentine Dinner Dance and Tea......The Invitations and Floral Wear!

Day 1 of our very first 7 day mission to have a complete dinner party has started! :)Today I will show you the beginnings of our family Valentine Dinner Dance and Tea - meaning an all day dance-a-thon surrounded by pink goodies and lots of love filled food!! :)

You cant start a party without an invitation so that is where we will begin. Gather any supplies you think will work well with the Valentine theme...heart punches, gems, red & pink papers etc.....you may not use it all but at least if you know what you have to hand its easier in the long run!Print out the number of invitations you need onto sturdy white card, make the font something special with it being for Valentines day. Even though its being held in your home and by you this doesnt mean you dont need to add little details....go to town with your ideas!! :)

Trim each invitation, punch a heart into the bottom right hand corner and using a faint ink pad, stamp lightly around the empty spaces with a swirl stamp to create a watermark. Now edge the outside with a red Copic pen - this will blend the white paper more into the red background to create a seemless finish.Using the same heart punch you just used for the invitation, punch out some more hearts from a couple of different Valentine patterned papers. Curl the edges slightly and adhere to the invitation randomly. Using the same red edging pen highlight the words RED, may make the invitee take more notice! lol
Mount the white base of your invitation onto red card and trip around, pull up the edges with a paper edger or your nails (...Im a nail girl!) and voila all you need is a little jewel in the punched heart and youre finished :)

On the invitation I mentioned that everyone would receive a red flower for their lapel at the dance. The second part today is going to show you how to make these flowers - so inexpensive, so cute and so flippin easy to do I swear you wont ever want to spend a fortune on flowers again!!
Just using scissors, cut out 4 gradually smaller circles - doesnt matter if they arent perfect circles as they are going to be distressed anyway.Using the same red pen as before, ink around the edges and crumple the circles into small balls. Open them up and again, drag your nail or paper edger around the edges to create small tears and wear. Layer the 'petals' on top of each other and add a brad to the middle to keep them all together. You can either add a brooch backing or simply double sided tape to keep in place for the dance - either way you have a simple yet effective floral decoration that everyone is sure to admire! Come back tomorrow for our first recipe and a drink to make you swoon into the arms of your loved one! ;)