Valentine Tree Felt Hearts

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.

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

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.