What to do with scraps of felt

I always knew I had kept my scraps of felt (from the making of cushions and bags) for a reason. My large bag full of the smaller bits and pieces 

and the large stash under the bed was going to come in handy for my next project. 

I had just bought myself one of those dieing machines (not one that coloured things , silly , one that cut things out) and was wanting to try it out straight away. It came with one die suitable for thicker fabrics such as felt , and within that die were 2 heart shapes. Ha ha I thought , pity I had  missed valentines day , but everyone loves a heart or two any time of the year.

I had just made some felted buntings , you know the triangular pennant type and got a great response from my team mates on Etsy, so thought perhaps a smaller version (those die hearts were small) would do the trick.   

Cutting out the hearts was so easy and fun to do , brilliantly taking little scraps of felt and turning them in to little shapes , finding out how many hearts you could get out of what was left of a sweater sleeve is great fun. 

But I needed to work out how to string the hearts together in to a garland.  I didn't want to machine sew my little beauties in to 1 large string of joined up hearts and I didn't want to have the string showing across the heart either. 

The only way to do it in my mind was to thread the heart through 2 layers of them and that's what I did. That way not only can you move the hearts on the string , having the distance between them to what you want , I could also include some of the thinner felts and the fair isle knits in to the garlands too.

Do you have any recycled tricks of your own to share , then please let me know and I'll do my best to share