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Free Tutorial - Danish Hearts by Helen Howes
Oh, what a Rabbit-hole this turned out to be. I have always liked the look of these traditional little frivolities, and thought they might be a nice project for the December newsletter; little stuff to make by the fire; with the young people of the household; you know the sort of thing...
I made a Pinterest page HERE and it was easy to populate - more I needed to know when to stop (I haven't yet). It turns out that there are thousands of really good tutorials on How and Variations on What, and I'm not going to make the how-to-do-it again, go over there and start more-or-less where you like..
I will add some notes on my experiments with materials, as they may be useful
I started with paper, as this is what is usual, also cheap and easy to find. You need good-quality paper, not too thin or thick, not brittle. Wrapping paper is good. I downloaded a couple of sizes of patterns and started with these fairly simple ones
Note that the bigger ones are easier to make at first
And, sitting in bed with scissors and a tray and my audio book, I made these two to start with...
Then another more complicated one from the same papers, and one from brown paper and a page from a road atlas and which is a) nice paper and b) 27 years out of date, so, not useful for driving any more...
So far, so good, but it was time to sleep, so the next morning I got out the fabrics and tried some more ideas
I tried three ways of reinforcing and stiffening the cloth, as on its own it really won't do this (I could, if I had some, have tried starch. I don't have some)
I bonded two layers of fabric back-to-back with Bondaweb and cut out two sections from these layered pieces
The resulting heart was a tad soft but did work
Then I tried bonding cloth to paper (more maps!) - this gave a nice double-sided look and was easy to work with
The heart was nice and crisp...
Lastly I used freezer paper ironed onto another piece of cloth and made another small heart
This was a success too, but I don't know how much handling the freezer paper would stand before coming adrift (although, it could be pressed again to re-attach it..
I taped the handles (just cut a strip) onto the paper hearts, I think stitching would work better for the cloth ones
And they actually hold things - sweets for the tree anyone?
So, great fun, lots of ideas. The Pinterest page HERE has crocheted, knitted, pastry, lots of paper variations, all sorts of mad ideas.. While we discussed this the ideas (thin plastic? double-sided papers? felt? transparent film? etc. etc.) kept occurring... Oh, dear, you didn't have anything more important to do, did you?
4, The Raveningham Centre, Beccles Road, Raveningham, Norfolk, NR14 6NU. United Kingdom