Create edible displays with red fruits such as cherries.
A limited budget shouldn't keep you from decorating for Valentine's Day. The emotional late-winter holiday is more about showing love than flaunting cash, and homemade decorations appropriately convey the warmth that's so important to the holiday's spirit. Make a Valentine's Day centerpiece as a group activity or a romantic surprise.
Romantic Valentine Centerpieces
If you're preparing dinner for your Valentine, you'll want to create an appropriately amorous place to present your labor of love. Buy a jumbo bottle of white wine in a clear bottle, and empty the liquid into a large carafe. If you don't finish off the carafe at dinner, you can store the white wine in the fridge for weeks. If you don't drink, buy a bottle at a craft store. Wash out the bottle, and allow its insides to air dry. Pen a love note, a meaningful quote or a favorite memory, and roll up your message tightly; tie it with a length of curled ribbon. Tuck your rolled note into the bottle, and use it as a centerpiece. Instead of the note, consider painting the bottle a translucent red, using glass paint, and fill the bottle with battery-powered LED string lights for a romantic, glowing ambiance.
For an instant romantic centerpiece, place a molded frame mirror face-up in the center of the table, and cover it with an assortment of lit votives and tealight candles.
Flower Centerpieces
Even if you can't afford a centerpiece overflowing with roses, you can create a surprisingly close facsimile with a pair of scissors and inexpensive tissue or crepe paper. To make both small and larger roses, cut long strips of tissue or crepe paper into two sizes: 1 inch by 11 1/2 inches and 2 inches by 18 inches. Along one side, make small rounded cuts every couple of inches. The cuts should resemble rounded flower petals. Loosely roll the paper into a 1- or 2-inch tube. Then, using the cut side as the top, pinch each loose tube at the bottom, allowing the top to fan out a bit. Gently pull at and fuss with the petals until they look the way you want, and then tape the pinched area to a pipe cleaner. Make flowers in pink, red, antique white and purple, and arrange their wire stems in an empty wine bottle, a glass canning jar, a paper-covered coffee can or a spare flower vase. You could also display the flowers without stems in a heart shape in the center of the table.
Instead of the traditional roses, use your favorite red or pink flowers, such as poppies and hibiscus. If you're lucky enough to live in a warm location where flowers have already started blooming in your backyard, you can snip a few for your Valentine centerpiece.
Food-Based Valentine Centerpiece Ideas
Celebrate the sweetness of love by creating a sugary centerpiece. Fill an empty clear vase, mixing bowl or storage canister with red candies or small cookies. Make red-tinted sugar cookies, or raid the family's Valentine's Day candy stash for red-wrapped candies. If you're serving a healthy Valentine's breakfast, fill the same kind of glass container with red, purple and pink fruits, such as strawberries, cherries, raspberries and purple grapes. For a centerpiece with a longer lifespan, gather red apples, red sugar-dusted nuts or homemade truffles in a basket. Tie a matching bow or wind a hand-strung candy garland around the basket.
Kid-Friendly Centerpiece Crafts
Get everyone involved in holiday decorating to create lasting family memories and distract the kids from their late-winter cabin fever. Older children can use heart-shaped cookie cutters to make shapes on sheets of wax. Supervise as they use a heat gun or hair dryer to melt the shapes against a pillar candle.
Direct the kids to cut two identical hearts, flowers, birds or cupid shapes from felt or card stock. Younger children should use safety scissors or observe. While the kids decorate their shapes with paint, markers, glitter, ribbons, buttons and stickers, coil the end of No. 15-gauge wire into a 5-inch-wide circular base. At the center of the coil, point the end of the wire upward. Let the wire extend for 8 to 10 inches, and then snip it. Make one stand for each child's shape, and vary their heights slightly. Instruct your helpers to line craft glue along the edges of their two shapes' undecorated sides, but leave a gap at the bottom, where you will attach it to the stand. Cluster these at the center of the family dining table.
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