Love is..... Felt Hearts!

I remember it well. It was about a week ago when I logged in to Pinterest. I'm pretty new to the whole concept, and not following so many people yet, but there were some new pins posted by Lucy. One of them immediately stood out. There were so many colorful pictures on my screen, but somehow they all seemed black and white compared to this one. The pin linked to this wonderful tutorial! It's made by Revlie over at REVolution. I knew it right away... we had to make it!

Matt and I went to two different craft stores in town, to buy as many colors of felt that we could get our hands on. We were lucky that both stores sold different colors, so we were able to get a nice and varied palette of colorful happiness. Twenty-one beautiful sheets of felt.

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The pattern doesn't link to a heart shape, but we found one on the lovely blog of Francine Clouden.

Here's a link to the page with the heart on it. At the bottom there's a PDF link to a heart cut out. We made a print at 40% to get the size we wanted for our hearts. 

We both are not very experienced in sewing, so it was a little fiddly and fidgety to sew these tiny hearts together, but after a couple we got the hang of it. We didn't have a big range of colors for sewing so we popped over to the craft store again, and bought a beautiful range of Embroidery Floss colors. It's crazy how many colors they sell, it must have been about 150!

We spent about 3 days sewing every morning and every evening, until we were satisfied with the amount of hearts. They were so satisfying to make! We loved the moment when you get to stuff them, as they become thick, squishy and even cuter!

The craft store also had a great range of wooden sticks, and we ended up going for the 4mm ones. We sawed them in many different lengths to get a random and varied looking 'forest'.

Attaching the cute hearts to the sticks turned out really easy with the help of a glue gun. The pattern called for glue dots, but we've never seen those here in Germany, not even in our gigantic craft store. The glue gun worked just fine however! 

And than we needed some jars and bottles. Luckily we hadn't brought any of our glass to the recycling yet, so we had plenty to choose from. We chose from a selection of juice bottles, jam jars and German sausage jars (I love German sausages!). We washed out our favorites and than it came to the exciting moment of filling them with the hearts! What a disappointment! All the hearts turned backwards and nothing stayed in it's place. 

Let's read the pattern again... There it was, you had to glue the sticks into the jars so they would stay in place. But gluing?

Matt came up with the most wonderful idea. Sand in the jars! And not just normal sand, colored sand! So off we went, back to the craft store (they really sell everything!), and we bought 6 colors of sand to match our hearts.

 Look at these gorgeous rainbowy shades! Don't they make you happy?

The sand worked like a charm. It made it very easy to adjust and arrange the hearts as much as we wanted.

How gorgeous do they look all clumped together! It was so much fun to play with all the possibilities. We had 28 hearts to play with (we've used some colors twice) and it gave us a lot of options.

But sometimes, the simplest arrangements can be the prettiest. So we went for a rainbow! Here's a final picture of our "Love is... Felt Hearts" forest.

What a great time we had working together on this fabulous project! It's a quick and easy project, and the end results are so very rewarding!

Matt & Dennis xxx

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