Happy heart days

The other day I was surfin' the 'nets and stumbled across this how-to on The Purl Bee; soon thereafter I realized that I have some fabric scraps and some blank cardstock:  I can do this!  And, in time!  Woot!

I dove into my stashes.  Fabric: small, odd-sized pieces, a few inches by a few inches, that I'd been saving for some kind of use one of these days... I'm especially pleased about being able to use the hot pink with multicolored cherry blossoms--something I brought home from Japan an embarrassing number of years ago.  Stationery: I cut some letter-writing paper in half to add more color.  I had some gold- and silver-splashed paper that worked wonderfully.

After just a bit of fudging with tension and stitch length I was off and running.   In a couple hours (measured by the passage of a couple of tween dramas), I had a dozen cards.



Here's a few things I did differently:

Because my fabric scraps were all different sizes,  I simply folded each piece in half and eyeballed a heart-shaped cut.  Then gave them all a quick press under the iron.

I put each fabric heart in place with a little bit of glue to avoid bunching or slipping off position.  This was helpful because there was a lot of turning involved to follow the curves and points of the shape.

I also played around with sewing the "fold" border onto the background cardstock at different edges, just to mix it up a bit.

This spool of thread in variegated reds added a fun, whimsical look, but also saved me both time and money in terms of not having to buy more than one spool, and not having to re-thread the sewing machine multiple times.  I chose to do zig-zag stitch for the cards' borders to show off the color changes.

The thread was the only item I purchased (with a 40% off coupon to boot), making the grand total for this project was something like eighty-four cents.  That's a whole lotta bang for under a buck!

I'm putting the last few in today's mail, and since they're all going domestic, my friends should receive them just in time.  (DC's was the prototype, which I managed to finish early and slip in his bag before he left for a conference on Wednesday.)  If you've got time today--or even tomorrow if you're going to hand-deliver--I highly recommend this quick and fun project!  Hearts will be glad!