We love making trees around here. Nope, I don’t mean growing trees, although we like that too, I mean decorative and seasonal trees. We gather up a few fallen branches when we are out for a walk. Bring the branches inside and pop them into a vase – instant tree! In fact we made an Easter tree and a Valentine tree last year. The beauty and simplicity of transforming a few bare branches into something alive and full is so appealing to me. But, what we really love to do is add some lovely, homemade objects to our trees. Over the last year I have been introducing my daughters to hand sewing and they really seem to be enjoying it. For our Valentine tree I decided to kick it up and teach them a new stitch – the blanket stitch. Here is how my girls made our sweet felt hearts.
You will need
2 sheets of felt
thread
needle
scissors
construction paper
1. Draw a large and a small heart shape on construction paper, cut them out.
2. Place the construction paper heart on the pieces of felt, and cut out 2 large hearts and one small heart. You can use 2 different colours or the same, depending on the colours your children like.
3. Using a needle and thread, stitch the small heart onto one large heart HOT TIP: for this project my girls used a regular sewing needle, however a dull cross-stitch needle works well with felt and will not poke a young child.
4. Stack the 2 large hearts on top of each other, wrong sides together. Use a blanket stitch to attach the hearts together. HOT TIP: Here is a great YouTube video of how to do a blanket stitch
5. To make the hanging loop, sew a few inches of thread through the top centre of the heart. Knot the two ends together and you have a loop.
6. Done.
Don’t be afraid to do this craft with younger children. You can easily eliminate the sewing and use fabric glue or just plain white glue to assemble the hearts. Allow younger children to design their own hearts, cut them out and glue away! We made a few of these and added them to our tree, along with the hearts I felted last year. I think we might add a few other things as the days lead up to Valentine’s day. Such a simple way to show love at this time of the year.
This craft is featured in the book The Heart Project. Find out more about this book and how you can purchase your own and donate to the American Heart Association here.
These are great Jen, we love making seasonal trees too and I will have to go find some red felt! Also I am passing on a Liebster Blog award to you and your blog, you can see the post here: http://wickednweird.blogspot.com/2012/01/liebster-blog-award.html. Happy Tuesday!
Thanks Lisa! I’ll check out the post, awesome!
These are soooo cute!! I just learned about your blog from Lisa over at Wicked and Weird. So glad to have stopped by. Love your blog background – too cute! Cheers 🙂
oh goodness these are so cute! i love the different shapes of the hearts. love it!
i have a creativity party going on at my blog right now; i would love it if you linked up this or any other amazing project you might have!
http://letbirdzfly.blogspot.com/2012/02/exodus-35-creativity-party-19.html
thanks so much for sharing!
Thanks for stopping by Bailey. I’ll hop over and check out your creativity party! Cheers.