This tutorial was meant to be up earlier today, but due to a last minute super important Dr’s appointment (for Lamp…I’ll talk about it later) it’s going up now and will be extremely shortened. Not that it’s that hard anyway.
Gather your supplies. Paper, pencil, heart shape to trace around, scissors. I used different colors of paper from light purple to dark pink for an ombre look. This would be a lot faster with a large heart hole punch. Try as I might, I couldn’t find one. In hind site, I should have tried harder. I cut out over 100 hearts. It took a long time.
So cut out your hearts. Cut out a lot of stupid hearts.
There are different ways to do this so I’m not going to break down my method but I used a cookie cutter and was able to get 20 hearts per page. **The most important part is to double up your paper and cut 2 hearts at a time. Then keep them in stacks of two. **
After folding the pages and tracing hearts this is what my paper looked like.
Ever wonder what it looks like to try and do tutorials with young kids? It looks like this…taking pictures while trying to occupy little ones 2 feet away. Trust me and just cut out your hearts when the kids go to bed. Much easier. However if you have a hole punch they can help in that process.
Then you have a big pile of cut out hearts like this. So pretty.
Then organize them by color.
Now line them up in order. I had so many hearts I decided to do 4 separate garlands going from light purple to dark pink. It was the order the paper was lined up in the store…so I went with it. Remember each heart is actually 2 hearts stacked together.
Now take your first two hearts stacked on top of each other and sew a straight stitch down the middle. This is where you kiddo’s can help by handing you the next hearts.
Leaving a little gap but not cutting the thread, put your next 2 hearts in…and so on and so on.
Your hearts will start to look like this out of the sewing machine…
When you have the whole row finished it’s time to 3-D-ize your garland. Simply take the two hearts and fold the sides over to create a 3-D look. It’s pretty intuitive once you do it. Another thing the kids can help with.
You can see the difference between the folded hearts and the flat hearts.
Voila! Beautiful strings of purple and pink heart garlands.
Yay for hearts.
The End.
love this! I tried to do the same thing this year, but I think I killed my sewing machine over Christmas. {I blame the teepee} I couldn't get it to run despite my best efforts, and went with the book-page garland instead. 🙂 I love the ombre effect on yours! And your mantle is divine with your artwork highlighted.
Beautiful! Thank you Miggy.
(I'm a new reader, I love your blog!)
Liseli
Love it, Miggy! The colors are so pretty. I've been enjoyin' me some paper garland making recently, too! I have some hand-held punches, and I mostly use those to punch out paper shapes. I've been using the good ol' glue gun to connect the paper shapes to yarn instead of sewing them together, although I really love the sewn look. Also, I really like the way you displayed your completed project.
I hope you had a really nice Valentine's Day with your family of sweethearts!
Thanks guys! MS–I loved your heart garland with the one read heart.
Liseli–Thank you! And welcome.
Linda–What is it about a good ol' fashioned paper garland? I love 'em.
Miggy…those garlands are L♥VELY. The Primary just gave the Bishop a, "heart attack" on his door last Sunday. Next year maybe we will string some heart garland on the Bishop's office doorway…and he can walk through them…kind of like the hanging bead curtians a la the Brady Bunch. Thanks for the tutorial!
I saw a really big heart punch at Michael's tonight for 16 bucks…kind of steep but if I had seen it before last Saturday I totally would have snagged it because it took me forever to cut the heart attack hearts…and mine weren't even uniform like your beautiful hearts.