I am super aware that this does not look easy. It is so easy. I whipped this arrangement – which is nice and low, so you can put it on your dining room table without completely obliterating your view of your fellow diners - up using exclusively grocery store-bought flowers, and in about ten minutes. (Okay, my son helped. But still.)
Step-by-step how-to is below!
I am literally bouncing up and down in my chair right now because I'm scrolling through the list of half-finished post drafts sitting on my Wordpress dashboard, and I cannot wait to show you all the cool stuff I've been up to lately. In the past three weeks, I have redone the exterior of my entire house. I have made over my kitchen. I have planted all the plants, have learned how to do something called a German Smear (omg just wait until you see it), and have identified the cutest and least crazily priced drawer pulls a person can find. And, oh yes:
I HAVE CREATED A FOUNTAIN.
FROM SCRATCH.
Remember Monday's post about potato-stamp Valentine's Day cards? The ones you can make with your kids minus the miserable stroll through the craft-store aisles? The inspiration behind it was what you see here: my daughter was napping and all of a sudden my son announced that he was willing to make Valentines for his classmates, and I had exactly two seconds to conceive of a doable plan before losing him to the living room rug, where the epic battle between Mini Cons and random dragon figurines that my mother bought at the Met had finally been put on pause for a moment.
And so this is what I decided to do: help him make school (of fish! whee, puns!)-themed Valentines that ticked all of my personal boxes: inexpensive (check), easy (check), witty (eh, sort of), and (seemingly) original (checkity check check check).
(It is not lost on me that I have an addiction to parentheticals. Moving on.)
What's more fun than painting potatoes? NOTHING.
My feeling about Valentine's Day, in a nutshell: I want to be all "Ooh! A teachable moment wherein my child can learn the value of giving and receiving love, albeit via paper cutouts!" But I also do not want to put any real effort into the Valentine's Day-celebrating process, because few things are less fun than dragging two children through Rite Aid in search of something - anything - that doesn't have a picture of a Minion and "You're One In A Minion!" written on it.
Regardless of your personal attitude towards Valentine's Day, here is a fact: When you have a kindergartener, you have to help him or her make and distribute Valentines, because that's in the contract you sign when you procreate. Fortunately for the begrudgingly-participatory Valentine's Day celebrators among us, I have a friend named Mollie who is about as interested in fussy DIYs as I am...and yet seems to be always creating beautiful things. When I want to look like a crafty genius (but don't want to, you know, try too hard), it is Mollie to whom I turn - and so it only made sense to ask her to start publishing her (actually completely for-real accessible) ideas to RG.
This is technically a photo of a woman painting, not of a woman doing drywall.
But strangely enough, when you google "woman doing home repair," what you get is mostly...porn.
So here is a photo of a woman painting. (I like her sneakers.)
