Stitched Hearts

Ohhhhhh. This. Was. Fun.  Really fun. If Valentine's Day were another year away I would make about 12 more variations on the needlepoint heart.  But here are two.  For you.  Kiss.

You can download the Valentine Stitcheries as a PDF (click that boldface title there) which comes in the form of two Valentine cards on one 8.5x11" sheet for you to give or to keep.  The cards themselves are a gridded pattern that you can use to make two different styles of needlepoint hearts with any sort of background you wish.  You could also use these charts as patterns for cross stitch.

With the striped heart on cream, I used a regular ole tent stitch (I have a helpful how to for you here) for the heart and used the Particularly Perfect palette of my wool kits (which would make tons of hearts).  For the background I made a basketweave, or wicker stitch, which covers canvas so fast.  While I have instruction in my Needleworks Notebook on this stitch, here's a quick reference. (Although mine is larger with four bars each instead of just three.)

The more fractal looking design on dark gray I dreamed up after all that wicker stitching.  I love how it looks!  Obsessed.  For this one I used the Particularly Perfect palette again and also the Nearly Neutral Palette and I adore how they look together.  I am dreaming of a whole large scale canvas filled with rows of hearts.  Sweet.  Speaking of canvas, this one is 11ct, though 12 ct would be fine too.  After they were stitched (7 episodes of Breaking Bad later) I trimmed them out with about a 3/8" border of raw canvas.

While they would be sweet framed, sewn into a zipper pouch, made into a pin cushion, a sachet or whatevs, I thought to just treat them like little pillows with an overlapped backing.  So I used some linen samples (eeek, just got some, shipping in April!) for the back.  I folded a double length for each overlapping piece instead of worrying about hemming the edges.


Pinned them all around right sides together, and sewed them on the machine with the needlepoint facing me so that I could be sure to settle my needle and the stitching right in between the last row of stitching and the rest of the needlepoint all around.  That was a long sentence.  Make sense?  You do want to fold the seam allowances over at the stitch line on each side, and overlapping at the corners before flipping through instead of cutting off the corners at an angle.  This is a little finicky, but worth not clipping too close to the stitching and makes a really stable corner.


Seriously fun, simple little project and a very special way to deliver sweets to your sweeties.


My sweeties have been messing around with the pattern themselves ever since they saw mama enjoying it and they are just so amazing.  This is one of the best crafts for kids, honestly.  Especially the younger girls being 9 and 11, they can do this on auto-pilot which rocks.

I don't think I'm done tinkering with the hearts yet, but glad to at least have these ready for you should you decide to indulge.  In other news Roman loves oranges now and he is telling everyone that he loves oranges now with so much pride.  He also has a new stuffed "kolala bear" and we do what ever we can to get him to say kolala bear because it's utterly adorable.

enjoy your weekend, xoxoxAnna