If any of you, my lovely readers, are in a long-term relationship then you will know how hard it is to keep things interesting as they so often are in the beginning. My partner and I have been together for 7 and a half years now and so we know how important it is to take time out for ourselves and have a little “Closh time” as we call it. One thing we both wanted to maintain was regular date nights. We agreed to do this at least once a month but the problem with this is we always run out of ideas and end up doing either a meal out or cinema trip which after a while can become a bit boring! So I set about my plans for making a date night jar so that we would never run out of ideas again.
We had a large Kilner jar lying around that we wanted to use for this but all I needed next was a lot of paper. I’ve seen many people make this on Pinterest using lollipop sticks but I wanted to use scraps of paper so that you could fit more text onto them. I decided on a scheme of 4 colours and bought squares of paper in these colours. I then cut each of the squares in half and arranged my piles by colour. The reason I chose 4 colours was because I wanted 4 categories of date night and we could pick and choose what we wanted depending on our budget that month. The 4 categories I chose are
- Free Date Nights
- Date Nights Under £20
- Date Nights Under £50
- Date Nights Over £50
This way I could write more ideas for the free date nights so that we didn’t have to spend so much money every time we wanted to spend quality time together.
Over a period of about 2 weeks I wrote down all my ideas on the scraps of paper and folded them up and popped them into my jar. The ideas were completely random and included all sorts of things such as “Building a fort in the living room” to “Playing laser tag together”. One thing I didn’t do was remember if I’d already written an idea before folding the piece of paper. Because of this it is highly likely that there will be duplicate date nights but oh well!
Once I had written out on all the scraps of paper and filled my jar up, the next step was to decorate it. I chose some large burlap ribbon and wrapped this round the jar gluing it in place with my glue gun. I then cut up some bits of a paper doilie and glued them onto the front in a circular shape. Then I wrote “Date Night Jar” on a piece of black card and cut it out into the shape of a heart.
To finish the whole thing off, I colour coded on a white luggage tag what each colour of paper meant. This way, if we want to have a cheap month we can pull out more of the blue ideas from the jar rather than the pink for example. Lastly, I tied some burgundy ribbon round the neck of the jar and threaded the luggage tag through. I tied the ribbon off into a bow and that was pretty much it. I love how cute this looks and think it is so Pinterest worthy! The good thing is once we have completed them all we can either fold them back up and do it all again or write out new ones. This would make a great gift for a married couple or an anniversary. I’m planning on gifting this to my partner as part of his Valentine’s day present but let me know what you think and what your plans are this Valentines day.
Miss Pink Chloe 