Felt Hearts

I am in the middle of a little project, currently at the stage of work in progress. I saw a short tutorial on Pinterest of these felt hearts strung together and thought it would be an interesting diversion from all the other pressing engagements of my life (currently, it's school holidays so nothing is proving to press very hard). The general idea is that you cut 2 pieces of felt, sew along one short end, fold over and sew the other short end, thus creating a heart shape. Then you cut strips off and, voila, lots of hearts. If you cut two different sizes of felt, you can get big and small hearts. I did yellow hearts this way, but found that two thicknesses of thick felt produced quite uneven cutting lines for my hearts. So with the orange hearts, I cut pieces beforehand (both widths were 1 1/4" and the length of the larger was 6 1/2", the shorter 4").

I also jazzed up the orange felt with a bit of printing with a stamp. It was from a set called Ironworks from Prima Marketing that I got from That's Crafty Online. In the sale as well - bargain! I used Sherrill Kahn Sorbet Lemon and when that got a bit low, I switched to a Dulux Tester Pot in Lemon Pie which wasn't as clear, but did the trick. The emulsion paint went on the inside so it's not as noticeable.

I used 3 thicknesses of Perle and zig-zag stitched them together to create a cord, and then started to string them together. I haven't quite finished yet, as it's turning out to be longer than the Nile, but I will try and print a picture of it in-situ when finished.

The only trouble I had yesterday was when washing the stamps. Due to its close proximity, I used the bathroom sink to wash my stamp, brayer, hands, face (it's easy to get carried away with the sheer delight of being messy) and later on was on the doghouse for leaving traces of paint in the sink. I did explain that it's preferable to trailing everything downstairs (probably) dripping as I go, but I have now been banned from the convenience of upstairs rinsing out. So when we have Mixed Media stairs, he'll only have himself to blame.…