I took a little time off yesterday, away from my lap top and away from those knitting needles. I decided to have a play with some wooden heart boxes I had acquired and an idea I had to cover them with recycled felt.
I used the rib from some old sweaters I had felted to wrap round the edge of the heart shape. I didn't have any glue (why would a knitter have glue?) but I did have some fabric interfacing , so I used that, trying my best to iron it down without burning my hands in the process. I had to sew the pieces together at the heart point as there was no way it was staying stuck together. Another piece of felt I stuck (again with the fabric interfacing) to the bottom of the box
I stuck some of the recycled hearts that I use for the heart garlands I sell on to the side of the other wooden heat shape , just to see if they would stick and heh! yes they did. I now have a treasure trove of hearts , somewhere pretty to store all my spare heart shapes.
It's not a perfect technique , but i did think it was worth sharing with you all. I love recycling things and if I can make something nice and pretty out of it then that's even better.
More Free tutorials from The Feminine Touch can be found here
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
