Better late than never

 I love decorating for each new season and holiday.  So, when the Christmas season ended I knew I needed to find a Valentine's heart to take the place of my the manger scene.  I had a blank square canvas left over from another project as well as some pearl beads.  I decided I wanted to create a heart out of the beads on a striped background.  Here are my supplies:

I started by painting the background of my canvas grey.  It took two coats to get a nice solid color.  Then, I taped off the stripes and painted the leftover space red.  I mixed a bit of grey into the red so that it wouldn't be so bright.  I wanted a darker, older looking red and only painted one coat so that the brush strokes and grey background showed through just a bit.  After the paint was all dry I cut the heart shape out of paper and lightly traced it onto the canvas.  I didn't want to free-hand my heart directly onto the canvas because they always seem to come out lop-sided!  Then, I just started hot gluing the pearl beads into the heart outline, trying to keep the three sizes of beads intermixed.  And, here's another picture of the final product.

I love the pearly heart on top of the stripes.  Too bad February is almost over!  On to finding an Easter or spring decoration to take its place.  I'll let you know what I come up with.