Decorating for Valentine’s Day is a surprisingly soothing way to spend a February afternoon. Once the end-of-year holidays have come and gone, winter can be such a cold, colorless drag as we draw nearer to the official day for celebrating life’s warmest experience, love. Valentine’s Day decorations can serve as an excellent reminder that love is as abundant as you make it and, like handmade paper hearts, no two loves are exactly the same. This year, take some time to augment your classic heart cutouts with peel-and-stick wall décor that stays continuously cute well past St. Patrick’s Day. Here are five of my favorite designs for commitment-free Valentine’s Day decorating:

1. Overlapping Hearts – Is your love the effervescent kind? If so, these overlapping heart wall decals are the perfect way to decorate your dearest’s daily life. Separate the warm shades from the cool shades or arrange them together for a joyfully balanced love motif on any wall and keep your love where it can’t be missed. When you’re in the mood to move things around, you can remove and reuse them without risking heartbreak over smudged paint.

2. Candy Hearts – The edible version of these iconic candy hearts might disappear from your local drugstore’s shelves come March, but you can preserve their sweet messages and pretty springtime pastels for as long as you like. Arrange these removable, reusable candy heart wall decals in your kitchen and store them on their original backing for next year when you’re ready for a change.

3. Cupcake chalkboard – Speaking of confection… Valentine’s Day is the perfect time of year to celebrate your devotion to desserts. Our cupcake chalkboard wall decal kit has plenty of room for listing the ingredients you’ll need to host your own cupcake decorating party. Ask the kids to help you arrange each sprinkle and crown the whole shebang with a cherry, choose a piece of chalk and take turns listing your ideas for the baking the perfect batch of cupcakes.

4. Luv Letters – One of my favorite ideas for decorating with oversized stick on letters is the brainchild of WallCandy’s founder, Allison Krongard. She chose letters patterned with adorable pink birds and added the words “I Am Loved” to the ceiling directly above her daughter’s bed. If there’s a lovelier phrase to wake up to, I haven’t heard it yet. Each individual letter is sold separately, so you can pick up only the ones you’ll need to get your message across.

5. Chalkboard Heart – My beau and I have used this removable, reusable chalkboard heart wall decal kit in every room in our apartment. In the kitchen, we kept a running grocery list on the big heart and phone messages on the little hearts. In the hallway, we sketched ideas for our next vacation together. And in the living room, we jotted down inspirational quotes to remind ourselves that love is often a verb requiring action. Is this chalkboard the secret to a happy relationship? We like to think so.

Have you done your Valentine’s Day decorating? Show us! Send a digital snapshot of your newly designed wall to hello@wallcandyarts.com.

December’s end calls for positive thinking. As the holiday tunes disappear from your local radio stations, visiting family members and friends return home to their busy schedules, and your trees and wreaths transition from living room to compost heap, it’s important to do what it takes to stay healthy and happy. We find the post-holiday season especially challenging because our everyday environments go directly from decorative and warm to dull and chilly. Blech.

Still, a new year inspires new goals and brings new possibilities. It also just happens to be the best time for introducing new wall decal designs for decorating your favorite spaces new and old. January might not always measure up to December’s merry frenzy, but reflection eventually leads to invigoration and making cheerful changes to our personal spaces is still as simple as peeling and sticking. Get started with six easy-to-keep resolutions inspired by our newest wall decal designs:

Explore at least one new city. No matter where you’d like to take your first-time-ever trip, you need only make a plan to get started. While you’re dreaming of corner bistros and sidewalk shopping, build your own bustling dream destination with repositionable city wall decals (shown above) that can spike a nursery, playroom, or bathroom with instant activity. Should you decide to relocate your cityscape, these removable, reusable wall stickers won’t leave shadows or smudges on your surfaces.

Start a family game night. As the old adage says, “The family that plays together stays together.” Not that the absence of a family game night is a devastating breach between parents and kids, but it sure can’t hurt to spend a few evenings every month playing classic board games or creating your own kind of tournament with French Bull’s cupcake wall decal game. This dynamic kit contains over 50 adorable wall decals you can use to design and redesign your family’s favorite new game.

Spark your own unique brand of creativity. If traditional creative pursuits such as taking a photography course or starting a novel don’t appeal to you, find a project that speaks to your style and let go of any self-imposed limitations. Imagine what the world was like before someone decided to dabble in the art form known as balloon twisting. We’re guessing things were slightly bleaker, which is why we’ve been working on a decorative wall sticker kit to encourage extraordinary art. These removable, reusable dog balloon wall stickers are a nod to all things creative, not to mention cute, cuddly, and static-free.

Love, love, and love some more. Get a jumpstart on your Valentine’s Day décor and design a wall to remind you that love is free and exists in many forms, shapes, and colors all year long. Add removable, rearrangeable overlapping heart wall decals to your daily landscape and let the abundance of brilliant hearts influence your priorities every time you pass through the room.

Remind yourself there’s much more to come. The newest addition to our family of patented chalkboard wall decals is full of jungle flair. Add a wild chalkboard jungle to your kitchen, home office, or playroom walls and use the included colored chalk to create to-do lists, jot down your official vacation countdown, or schedule a movie night for snuggling with the kids. Should you need a little inspiration to get started on your latest creative project, try designing a line of evening wear to attract sophisticated chicks, elephants, and giraffes.

Plan your next big shindig. Once you’ve got a clear space on your schedule, nail down a day to invite those long-lost cousins, nieces, nephews, and neighbors over for celebrating a birthday or holiday. The newest design in our line of party wall decals is a tea-riffic tea party birthday wall decal kit that begs to be paired with crumpets, cupcakes, and coffee for the grownups. If it’s a Valentine’s Day hug-a-thon you’re hoping to hold, design a background with candy heart wall decals and watch them fall in love.

What are you hoping to accomplish in 2012? Got a specific design project in mind? We’d love to hear about your goals (and maybe lend a hand, if we can). Leave a comment or send an e-mail to hello@wallcandyarts.com.

In order to debut our new kid-inspired designs for 2012 in the most stylish way possible (and maybe get a few extra imaginative perspectives on how each infinitely positionable wall stickers kit might be arranged), we enlisted the help of a national talent agency, The CuteKid, to help us find a handful of enthusiastic cuties who love playing dress-up and having their pictures taken. They introduced us to 20 kids between the ages of 2 and 7, all of who arrived excited and accompanied by their encouraging parents.

We set up shop in New York City’s 28on27 Studio and designed a few different backgrounds to welcome our adorable cast. Because we’ve all directly experienced how difficult it can be to keep a child waiting, we had the foresight to add a classic distraction for the kids waiting for their call times on the sets. We covered a large space with our patented chalkboard wall decals and created a blank, inviting canvas with several bowls of colored chalk. Just as we hoped, the chalkboard wall was a big hit and the kids (along with a bunch of parents who couldn’t resist) had a blast choosing pieces of chalk and drawing their own masterpieces.

Fortunately, none of our cuties had to wait too long between set redesigns. One of the glorious things about our peel and stick wall decals is that they can be removed and reused over and over again, which is a key feature when you need to decorate and redecorate a set quickly between shots (or rebuild a gift show booth that burned to the ground in the middle of the night).

The props were another crowd-pleaser. Our prop stylist, Maureen, compiled an array of hats, scarves, toys, and costume jewelry. The kids tried on costumes – the cowboy and cowgirl props were definitely the day’s winners – and presented smiles both wide and genuine for Mike, our warm and patient photographer.

While we’re not quite ready to reveal our new designs, we’d love to share a few images from what amounted to a pretty fantastic (and exhausting) day. If you’d like to see more shots from our photo shoot, we’d love to show you! Visit our Facebook page and flip through the album called NYC Photo Shoot/December 2011. Enjoy!

Maureen's prop table was so much fun.

Drawing on the wall is a dream come true. Our removable chalkboard wall stickers were a hit!

Two more cuties writing on our patented chalkboard wall decals.

Our lovely CuteKid participants decorating with reusable Dottilicious polka dots wall stickers.

Photo credit: Ian Barnard

Christmas Day is only two weeks away, but your shopping list isn’t getting any shorter. Between your kids, relatives, friends, and the lucky colleague whose name you picked from the Secret Santa bowl, there are probably still a few handfuls of folks you’d like to surprise with a little something special this year. ‘Tis the season to feel elfish, right?

Giving gets even better when it’s done without breaking your holiday budget. We’ve compiled a quick list of 10 great holiday gifts under $50, which we’ll gladly ship to any of the 48 contiguous states for free until the last day of December. When you give a gift from WallCandy® Arts, you support a small mom-owned-and-operated business that designs products proudly made in the USA with non-toxic, high quality materials that will last for years to come. So, go ahead – shrink your shopping list with universally appealing wall décor from our 10-under-$50 gift guide:

Luv Letters – $6 per letter

Help your coworker claim his cubicle with starry blue stick on letters, provide your family’s patriarch with a proud surname to display on the foyer wall, or personalize your daughter’s bedroom with peel and stick letters in a whimsical bird print.

Superstar Chalkboard – $14

Give your niece a removable, reusable chalkboard star sticker to decorate her bedroom door now (and her dorm room door later). It’s removable and reusable without damaging surfaces, so her parents and future resident advisor won’t have to worry about chips or smudges.

Mini Chalkboard Panels – $18

Redesign your beau’s office space or your son’s pretend workshop to include mini chalkboard decals he can use and reuse to manage his to-do list without damaging that cherished Mets-themed paint job.

Mini Whiteboard Panels – $18

If there’s only one way to show your child’s teacher some thoughtful holiday appreciation, it’s giving him or her a trio of peel and stick dry erase decals for the classroom, kitchen, or home office.

Watch Me Grow – $32

For your family’s littlest growers, a cheerful growth chart wall sticker provides the best way to check vertical progress daily without marking up the walls.

Design Your Own Snowman – $38

For your aunt and uncle’s family, a design-your-own-snowman kit packed with removable, repositionable winter wall decals will encourage them to spend more than a few snowless afternoons sipping hot cocoa and building snow pals indoors.

Rococo Chalkboard – $36

This regal-looking decorative chalkboard decal is gorgeous enough to fit in with your best friend’s posh living room décor and functional enough to provide your dear mother a place for working out her latest recipes.

Chalkboard Heart – $36

No kitchen is complete without a peel and stick chalkboard heart for jotting down phone messages, grocery lists, or love notes. This spacious chalkboard wall decal is the perfect place to write “I adore you” all year long.

Night Lights – $48

Surprise your dear mother with a screened-in porch decked out in glow in the dark wall decals that emit just the right amount of moonlight without electricity or recharging. Each peel and stick strand is removable and reusable, so she can easily transfer her design to the guest bedroom in case visiting grandkids need a little nighttime light.

My Sunshine – $48

Know a nursery or playroom in need of some warmth? This all-in-one sunshine kit comes with a brilliant sun wall decal and the celestial accessories to keep blossoming babies always looking on the bright side.

Need your gifts by Christmas Day? Order with ground shipping by Dec. 16, or with expedited shipping by Dec. 20. We can’t guarantee that orders placed after those dates will arrive in time.

Happy holidays!

WallCandy's removable wall decals are beloved by the Huffington Post's gift gurus.

So did you take our holiday shopping advice for the Thanksgiving holiday weekend?

DID YOU?

Well, whether you relaxed on T-Day or not, Black Friday and Small Business Saturday are now distant memories. However, there’s still time to take advantage of WallCandy’s amazing 4-Day Sale — Buy One and Get One for 50% Off (click here for details)!

According to the Los Angeles Times, Cyber Monday was only the 12th most popular online shopping day of the year back in 2006. Not surprisingly, today it is Number One by far.

We’re celebrating our Cyber Monday with a bit of pride for twice cracking the Huffington Post’s “Best 100 Gifts Under $100” list.

HuffPo enthusiastically recommends our peel-and-stick Chalkboard Circles, also a fave of Everyday with Rachael Ray. These fun round decals (chalk included) give a 360-degree twist to the traditional rectangle chalkboards we’re all so accustomed to using. Check out some candid feedback from our recent customers:

Unfiltered, uncensored product feedback from WallCandy Moms!

Oh and Monika’s Mom, we concur that the best chalkboard experiences will result from non-oily hands.  Grease-covered chalk can also slip and cause poor penmanship!

The Huffington Post is also a fan of our Blossoms collection, a splendid blend of bluebirds, butterflies and floral magic.

Here’s a quick glimpse of what the nature-loving crowd thinks of our removable wall sticker tribute:

Luckily, there are no reports of French Fry oil on any of the bluebirds or butterflies. From what I understand, this can cause some significant flight problems.

Happy Cyber Monday, Everyone!

Knowing when to decorate for fall is a bit more complicated. Letting go of summer and its precious barbecues, baseball season, and stroll-worthy sidewalk sales can feel bittersweet, simply because there’s no season quite like summer for nine months each year. Thank heavens autumn provides such a lovely transition filled with pies, pumpkins, and a multitude of reasons to wear gauzy scarves. If decorating for fall is on your list this week, start by carefully storing your warm-weather things and sweeping the summer sand and spiderwebs from your house’s crevices. Once your template is nice and blank, surround yourself with décor that pays homage to autumn’s favorite attributes.

1. Settling into a new school year

Now that September has passed and your child’s teacher can match those cute little faces to his or her classroom roster, it’s necessary to keep your kids pumped about school until their first holiday break. Instead of fussing over undone homework and an abundance of time spent in front of the television, ask your kids to take control over their own to-do lists and promote the lifelong joy of finishing work to make room for play. Add a desk to your son or daughter’s workspace and use reusable, removable chalkboard wall decals to show him or her how to list and check off assignments, practice calculating math problems in preparation for test day, and prioritize the steps toward completing school projects. Should your child ever decide to rearrange the room or move upstairs once a sibling has gone off to college, simply unstick the chalkboard wall stickers and restick where needed.

2. Camping

Fall brings ideal camping weather – it’s not too hot or too cold, and the bugs are packed up and heading underground for their own unique holidays. If you can’t make it up to Lake Lovelylake for the weekend, try your own backyard, or better yet, a makeshift tent city in your very own home. To recreate a dusky campground atmosphere, hang reusable glow in the dark wall decals just above the nearest window and assign each child his or her own battery-operated lantern. Make parent-supervised s’mores on the stovetop without worrying about mixing open flames with volatile pillow fights. As long as there’s warm snuggles and recreated starlight, it doesn’t matter where you are – those camping memories will stick.

3. Halloween

Odds are, your kids have already chosen their costumes for this year (or narrowed the list down to a mere 20 possibilities). You might have already carved a pumpkin and chosen your house’s official candy giveaway, too. One of many jobs parents assume during the month of October is keeping the kids from exhausting their excitement too soon, which is why we created a peel and stick Halloween wall décor kit with unlimited pumpkin-designing potential. Instead, put the knives away and spend those impatient afternoons going nuts creating jack-o’-lanterns, arranging bats, and dreaming of a candy corn rainstorm. Our wall stickers kit is removable and reusable, so you could always volunteer to transfer it to your child’s classroom and win some points with an equally overextended teacher.

4. Local leaf-peeping

If you don’t have time to head toward Maine before the oranges and reds turn to browns and darker browns, fear not – most towns can boast some nice fall foliage, even if it doesn’t quite qualify as a tourist attraction. Autumn is the best time to don a light jacket and plan a nice family stroll for an afternoon of tree-gazing and deer-spying. If your kids need help getting in the mood, decorate their bedrooms and playrooms with removable deer wall decals in vibrant colors. Designing an homage to nature with reusable wall stickers is so incredibly easy, the kids could give you a hand as you spruce up their spaces.

5. Thanksgiving

If you’re planning to host Thanksgiving dinner, now’s the time to get that kitchen redecorating project underway. Pick out a paint color, hit the hardware store, and consider creating a fall-tastic focal wall that complements your chosen color. One of the easiest ways to accomplish instant décor is by adding removable peel and stick wallpaper to one wall. Depending on the size and shape of your designated space and whether or not you’ll need to trim out squares for letting electrical sockets show, you could add some serious cute to your kitchen or dining area before lunchtime. If only the holiday menu were so easy…

What’s your family’s favorite autumn activity? How do you like to decorate your home for a positively fabulous fall season? Leave a comment and tell us about it!

Once Labor Day weekend has passed and the grocery store’s produce aisle becomes a regular apple variety extravaganza, our nostalgia for autumn is at its peak ripeness. We’re even inspired by the apple’s abundant shape, which is one of the many reasons we created our removable, reusable Big Apple chalkboard wall decal. It’s resilient, it’s classic, and it can help you run a flourishing household. There are many ways to use a peel and stick chalkboard, but we’ve narrowed it down to our favorite three in celebration of apple season:

1. Write down a recipe. First, whip up some homemade applesauce to save for garnishing pork chops and making fudgy (and slightly healthier) brownies. Freeze the leftovers for later. Next, make something delectable to reward your staple stockpiling. We suggest this easy apple crisp recipe from Betty Crocker’s online cookbook:

Ingredients

4 medium tart cooking apples, sliced (4 cups)

3/4 cup packed brown sugar

1/2 cup all-purpose flour

1/2 cup quick-cooking or old-fashioned oats

1/3 cup butter or margarine, softened

3/4 teaspoon ground cinnamon

3/4 teaspoon ground nutmeg

Directions

Heat oven to 375 degrees. Grease bottom and sides of 8-inch square pan with shortening. Spread apples in pan. In medium bowl, stir remaining ingredients until well-mixed, then sprinkle over apples. Bake about 30 minutes or until topping is golden brown and apples are tender when pierced with a fork. Serve warm with vanilla ice cream.

(We added oven-toasted pecan pieces to ours for extra crunch and antioxidants.)

2. Plan an apple-picking trip. There are at least nine states that can boast a substantial apple crop every fall. If you live anywhere near Washington, New York, Michigan, California, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Virginia, Connecticut, or Massachusetts, you’re a simple brainstorm away from enjoying an apple-picking experience. Choose a nearby orchard, block off an afternoon, and gather the kids. In the days leading up to your family’s apple adventure, jot down the details in chalk to keep track of the plan.

3. Encourage better eating habits. According to the Center for Disease Control’s website on the power of eating a variety of fruits and vegetables, a 6-year-old girl who exercises between 30 to 60 minutes per day should eat a cup and a half of veggies and a cup and half of fruits daily. Use the website’s handy calculator to find out what each member of your family needs and keep track of individual day-to-day fruit and veggie intakes on a chart you’ve doodled on the chalkboard wall decal. Now’s your chance to practice sketching a few adorable asparaguses. (P.S. One small apple counts as a full cup of fruit!)

Where’s your favorite apple-picking spot? What’s your favorite apple-packed dessert recipe? Leave us a comment and share your apple appreciation.

After the sports drought of summer for gridiron fans, pro football and college football come back each fall to save us from despair just in the nick of time. With so many teams to follow – Penn State, USC, Alabama, Titans, Chargers, Ravens – I’m always challenged to get organized and keep track of what team is playing, at what time, and on what channel…this is hard work! And that doesn’t even include the fantasy players I follow.

Back in the day, I spent time scrawling in pencil on the drywall in the basement or taping up sheets of legal paper until the place looked like a scene from the film Seven. But now, with Wallcandy Arts peel and stick chalkboard wall decals and large stick on white board panels, I can just use the large adhesive decals to keep track of everything. I jot down that the Giants play the Redskins on Monday night and the Titans’ Chris Johnson just rushed for over a hundred yards last week and is on track for a single season title. Life is good! Or, I can erase everything and start from scratch if the Ravens are on a losing streak and I don’t want to look at that ugliness.

Even better, I can peel the material off and place it back on the original backing for transporting to my friend Brian’s house when we watch games there. Because there’s no risk of leaving behind mess or residue on the walls, I’m safe from scuffing up the wall and enduring the wrath of his wife and mine. With Wallcandy Arts products, there’s never a problem.

They’re large and can be removed easily and taken to the office to put on the wall near the community fridge… and then removed if the boss objects. (When he or she leaves for the day, just put it right back up and keep on bracketing – it works for me!)

I also like to use WallCandy’s reusable Frames wall decals – they add a retro Polaroid look to pictures of my boy, Derek Jeter, or anybody I think will bring me good luck during the run to the Series. Kurt Gibson and Lou Gehrig are favorites, too.

These removable wall stickers are tailor-made for the sports fan, so check ‘em out!

Frames are truly among our favorite removable, reusable wall decals because of their decorative versatility. They can be captioned and recaptioned with a dry-erase marker, and just like the Polaroid camera resting quietly among the dustbunnies in your attic, they make any image look coolly vintage.

As kids armed with our own Polaroid cameras, we loved dabbling in landscape photography. While portrait shots of our parents, grandparents, and childhood doggies needed time to appreciate in aesthetic value, photographs of backyard sunsets and mountaintop views from Girl Scout campgrounds were always instantly amazing. Those Polaroid-captured lookouts got us thinking about the places we’ve been and how each destination could potentially inspire us as we were deciding how to decorate a nursery. Any of the following five decorative destination ideas could be pulled together with a few carefully chosen snapshots displayed on the wall in Polaroid style, but we’ll let you use your imagination:

1. Nashville, Tennessee

You won’t need to fly all the way to Music City to find a few country-inspired items for decorating a nursery. Paint the room in shades of moody blue, pose your guitar in the corner near a cozy rocking chair, and add a framed poster of the Parthenon shot during a semi-rare winter blizzard. If you’ve got time to do some hunting, you could easily add a row of baby-themed country records on one wall. Give yourself a big country kiss if you can find “Baby’s Got Her Blue Jeans On” by Conway Twitty, “Baby Let’s Play House” by Elvis Presley, or “Baby on Board” by The Oak Ridge Boys.

2. London, England

Start with a search for crib bedding and textiles in just the right shade of Tower Bridge blue and top with throw pillows printed with the Union Jack or graphic renditions of famous London landmarks. Add touches of Royal Botanic Gardens with clusters of colorful flower wall stickers near the baseboards or on the wall behind the changing table. Pull the nursery’s theme together by using removable and reusable wallpaper in a London bus print to create an accent wall that doubles as an ode to the oh-so-stylish Brits.

3. New York, New York

Anyone who declares the city to be no place for babies has never fallen asleep to the soothing din of muffled afternoon traffic. If you can paint squares and straight lines, start your city chic nursery with a handpainted black-and-white-checkered skyline. Design your own rush hour motif with peel-and-stick car wall decals that could potentially highlight a crib repainted in taxicab yellow. Complete the look with a removable, reusable apple chalkboard wall decal for displaying a few lines of “Mannahatta,” Walt Whitman’s plush poem about New York City.

4. Eugene, Oregon

If your idea of serene is lined with tall trees, keep Eugene in mind as you prepare the nursery for its peaceful little inhabitant. Choose nursery furniture made with natural wood, and cushy textiles in leafy greens and chestnut browns. Continue building your forest room with a reusable tree wall sticker you can arrange and rearrange to resemble a sweet spring sapling. If you’d like to add some adorably watchful nighttime critters to your baby’s abode, try a few owl wall decals in a kit that happens to also contain a silvery shade tree and matching night sky.

5. Corea, Maine

Spend one afternoon in a maritime museum and you’ll likely emerge an expert on how to decorate a nursery in a nautical theme. Begin by designing a focal wall covered with peel and stick wallpaper in blue and cream stripes. Use the leftover wallpaper to line bookshelves where jars of sea glass can share space with a few decoratively displayed books, such as Lois Lenski’s The Little Sailboat, or Jerry Pallotta’s The Boat Alphabet Book. Add lamps that cast a seaside sunset glow, then create spaces for snuggling with schools of stuffed fish, lobsters, and mermaids.

What’s your destination inspiration? Leave a comment and share your own favorite places and nursery decorating ideas.