Wednesday, January 27, 2010
saint valentin
 I'm thinking about Valentine's Day this year. Last year, I found myself at the local Pharmasave, at 8:30 pm, buying the last box of Dora and Cars Valentine's cards I could find, scrawled the kids names on them and sent them to daycare the next day. It felt awful.
The year before that I thoughtfully prepared little bags of treats with handwritten tags for each child in each of their classes...that felt much better.
So this year, I decided to make little fabric Valentines - about 40 of them - of scrap fabric. I drew a little template from paper, piled 6 or so layers of fabric in a stack, and cut them all out - the cutting took the better part of an evening and made a really good dent in my stash! Then, taking inspiration from Christina's idea from last year, I zig zagged the edges roughly, just to hold the front and the back together. The first one I did, I stuffed with wool, thinking that a slighly puffy look might be nice. Not so much. It was difficult to keep together, sew, and just looked, well, funny. I also cut a length of my favourite yarn in 'Victoria' to make a little loop so they could be hung up like ornaments, thinking the kids might like to hang them from their backpacks, or on their bed side tables, or even keep them to put on the Christmas tree, you never know!
I sewed 21 of them before a little person woke up and needed a mama cuddle, so I still have several more to go, but when I hung them up to take these photos, I fell in love with how they look as a garland, which of course, gives me other ideas...
*****
 This is not a good photo, it was very hard to get a nice shot of this garland, but this is a Valentine's garland that I thought would be fun to make with the kids. They had no *actual* participation in this particular item, but they crafted their own individual hearts while I was sewing these. The hearts are three layers of wool felt, purchased at Nurtured (not yet available online, but we're working on it!), cut out randomly by hand with no templates, and sewn together with a whip stitch. I ABSOLUTELY LOVE hand stitching, and applique, and embroidery, but I have no time for a big project (like a quilt), so these little projects keep me happy. I did 9 or 10 little hearts, the kids used their scissors and cut out their own shapes and BananaMuffin did some sewing (mostly with sequins, she's mama's girl!) while Spunky mostly used glue. We just had fun making a mess with felt and craft supplies. It was a nice afternoon together.
To make the letters, I printed out letters from a word processing program in a very large font size, cut them out of the paper and used the paper as a template, then cut the letters out of felt. The great thing about felt is that it doesn't fray, so you don't need to do anything else to it. The whole garland is strung together using Nymo beading thread to be extra strong, but you could just as easily use fishing twine, thread, yarn, or whatever you have on hand. The way that the letters are cut out, with a lot of empty space (particularly the 'v') means that if the garland is not against a wall (if you hung it from the ceiling, for example), the letters flop around and fall over, so you will want to take this into consideration for your own project - the hearts and letters are also not double sided, so on the back, you can see all of my stitching. If I had made this to hang from the ceiling, I would have made the fronts and the backs equally pretty - and I probably wouldn't have used letters.
Felt is so great to work with, it requires no extra finishing. Perfect for 5 minute projects!
Happy Reusable Valentine's Day!
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