Heart Garland, how to make a heart bunting, VLOG

Hi everyone, it's Jessica. Welcome back to my channel. Today we're working on another fun Valentine's Day project. We're making a heart garland. So let's get started. I've been working on heart garland and here are what my hearts look like so far. These are pieced right sides together and then sewed and then turned inside out and I have a hole here. I'm just gonna put some stuffing in the inside. So, so far I have three of those and I'm getting ready to make one with this striped fabric. So I just hand drew this template on a piece of paper. Whenever I hand draw hearts, I just fold the paper in half and then I draw half of the heart and then I open it, I make sure I like how it looks. I trim where I don't like how it looks and then what that does is ensure that everything is even and both of my sides of my hearts are 100% symmetrical. I'll put the link to this template below but you could really use anything. Any heart you draw will work. Now I trace that template onto this fabric here and then I'm just going to cut on the line. I traced, I did trace it with a water-soluble marker but you don't have to, you can just trace it with pen, pencil, marker, anything because this is going to be, like we're gonna sew a quarter inch in from this line so it doesn't matter if you have remnants on your fabric or not. They will all be on the inside of the project and you won't be able to see that at all. So just take your time and cut around the heart until you have two identical hearts cut out and you could make them match front and back like I am or you could use different fabrics on the front and the back, that's completely up to you. Here's my front and my back of my heart and I'm using the same fabric like I showed you and I am just going to put them right sides together. Now I find like I'm not always perfect when I'm cutting out shapes like this but it's pretty close. You want to pretty closely match all the way around, definitely like under an eighth of an inch in differences so that anything that's not accurate will just get lost in your seam allowance and then we're going to sew around it, leaving a small space so that we can turn it right side out. So I just put my needle down there and I'm gonna stitch forward and then backstitch and then I'm going to sew with a quarter of an inch seam allowance. When I get to the point, I just pick it up, pivot, turn and then continue sewing. I have my quarter inch foot on here so that I'm maintaining a quarter of an inch seam allowance. Sometimes when you're doing shapes like this, it's really easy to shy away from the quarter inch. That's what I find I do on something like this. I would do less than a quarter of an inch. So I'm like just making a conscious effort to keep my fabric up against the foot. Now, if you did all of your pieces the same way, it wouldn't matter if you did less than a quarter of an inch or more than a quarter of an inch. And also, this is a garland. It's not a quilt where you're worried about putting blocks together and having them match up and be the same size. If this heart isn't the same exact size as the next heart, it really doesn't matter. And when you string all your hearts up together, it's going to look great anyway. So I'm just coming around. I'm gonna leave, you know, I'm gonna leave about two or so inches here open. So I just come right up to that backstitch to secure it and then cut. You can see the amount that I left open here. This will be for turning it after. There's a few things we have to do first. The most important one I find is cutting right here. Now, when we cut, we want to cut close to the thread, but not on it. If we cut on the thread, we're just gonna ruin the whole thing. We'll have to start over. So I cut that line there so that I'm right up next to it, but not on it. And then we're just gonna take a little bit of this bulk away. Now you can do this by making Vs. You can do a bunch of Vs around it. A V looks like this. You would clip close to the thread, but not on it. And then come at it for another angle like that. Then just take those little bits off so it looks like that. Sometimes when I'm doing these, I feel like these are a little bit of a pain in the butt. So I do this. And this works just fine. We're reducing the bulk in this round portion when we turn it right side out. And I find like this works. I often just do that instead of the Vs. So we'll do a couple here like this just to take away some of the bulk. And again, you need to be careful here that you're not going through the thread or on it. We're just going close to it. If I can bring you close, you can see close to it, but not on it. And so we'll just do like one more of these. There we go. That's kind of roughly what mine looks like. Now I'm just going to put my fingers in here and turn this right side out. You're definitely going to need like a stiletto or a crochet hook to get this to lay really nice. And I usually just do that when I'm pressing them. One thing with the stiletto, which is why I don't use that extremely often, is that it's pointy and it can easily just bust through the seam here. So what I like to do is just use like something blunt like this, the end of a crochet hook. This is a paintbrush, the end of a paintbrush. And then I just kind of drag it along the seam, just like when we turned our stocking inside out that we made in December. And I just help it. You can see that looks a ton better already. We just did that. Then I just repeat that on the other side. And I also like to do this right when I'm ironing. So I will just run this little bit along it like this and I'll hold it in place. And then I'll just set my iron on top of it while it's laying perfect like this. Then I'll repeat that over here too. Get it just right, set the iron on it and press it. And then this little bit that we have open here, I try to make sure that I'm just leaving a quarter inch seam allowance there and that these are lining up perfectly because later we're going to just stitch that closed. But you can see here, this is looking really nice. And you just make as many of these as you want. So I'm going to make some more and then we'll press them and stuff them all at the same time. I've gone ahead and I've made quite a few more hearts and I'm ready to start assembling them. So I measured the space in my dining room where I want this heart garland to go. And I'm just going off of that. You could make this any size, any number of hearts that works for you. And I cut a length of yarn, way longer than what I actually need. And there's a lot on each side of it. And then the other side of yarn where I'm putting the hearts on, this is, it's very long. I'm just threading with this tapestry needle. And what I'm going to do is just put another heart on. I already have two on. These can move across the yarn here. So I can decide how far I want to space them out once I'm finished or once I'm getting close to finish to see exactly how long and how many hearts I need this on. I'm just going to lightly stuff my heart so that it's about the same size as these other ones. And once I get it lightly stuffed, just about like that, I will put it on top of the heart of one of the other hearts. I wanna try to put the yarn in at a really similar point so that they hang from about the same point, on this garland. So I got it through and it feels like it won't go through, but then if you just wiggle it, it eventually does. And I wanna come out at around the same point too. So I kind of just marked that with my fingers and then I just come out the other side. And when you're pulling this through, it really distorts it, but I just pull it through. And like I said, I have a really oversized piece of yarn, so I have to pull it through quite a bit. But you're able to fix that distortion pretty easily. Now I have three on. And the last thing to do is close this up. So I have red thread. I'm using the same red thread for all of them. It's just one that I've had for a while that I use like for binding and stuff. And I'm just going to use the ladder stitch to close this hole up. So I just come up on one side. This is tied in a knot here. And I just come up on one side and that little knot gets buried. And then we're just going to do a ladder stitch. So to do that, right now I'm on the far side. I'm just going to stitch directly across where I am and then go up a little distance and pull that through. And then I'm gonna repeat that. I'm gonna go back to the other side and go up a small distance. And I'm just going to do this all the way across here. Once you have gone a few stitches, you can pull it really tight and you can see it disappeared there. And that spot is nice and closed. So you just repeat this. You go opposite where you are, travel up just a little bit, and then go to the other side, travel. And you continue doing this until your whole space is closed. And then I just, I pull it tight so the stitches become invisible, but then I just give it a little tug back so that they lay straight and they're not curled or curved at all. And I think that makes it look really nice. Now you can see these other ones like this one, you can't even see. And same thing for this one here. You can't even see those seam lines. Once I've closed up the whole distance there, I just take my thread and I tie it in a knot so that it's relatively close to this heart. That looks good to me. Then I'm gonna take the thread and go back into the seam. And I'm just gonna come out, you know, a distance away on the back of the heart. Once I pull this through and the knot gets really close, I put my fingers on the seam to squeeze it right where the knot's gonna go in. And then I pull from the back. And what that's gonna do is just pop the knot underneath the seam and secure that for me so it won't come open. And then I just go to the back and I clip that and rub it and it kind of just buries that thread completely. So now I have three hearts on my garland and I'm just gonna continue repeating this process until I have as many hearts as I need on this garland. I have been working on my hearts. I made 17 and I'm on the last one. I didn't record it when I did this first one, but I'm gonna show you now what to do. So I tied a double knot here right next to this last heart. And then I did a crochet chain to make a little loop to hang. And that's what I'm about to do here. So I know that this heart is placed in the right position and I'm just going to tie a double knot here. So there's one and I'll tie a second. Okay, and now I'm going to start chaining. So what I did on the other side is I made a slip knot and I tried to make the slip knot end right next to the other knot like this. So it's pretty close. And then I tighten the yarn around the crochet hook and on the other side, I chained 40. You know, this isn't a video meant to teach you how to crochet. I'm just letting you know what I did. So we can broach crochet in another video. I've had some requests for those since I shared the little critters that I made last year as a Christmas gift. So I'm trying to figure out how best to teach crochet content because I do have some crochet patterns. I actually wrote crochet patterns before I wrote quilt patterns. Most of them are baby blankets and blankets like afghans like that. But I'm trying to best figure out how to structure those videos. And basically, like I said, I'm just gonna crochet 40 of these chains. And after I do 40, you basically just pull the rest of the string through that and now it's secured. So the next thing, I'm just gonna trim. I have way too much yarn. I'm just gonna trim it so it's easier to deal with. And the next thing is to just, what I did was I looped it like that to make it and then I just tied another knot right in the same location as the remaining knots that we have. And I try to just angle this knot in the right position as I'm tying it like that. I have a little bit extra here, but I really think that's okay. And then I cut this second yarn piece really close to the knot like that. So now I have a way to hang it on both sides and the chain of these hearts is complete. Here's a little peek at the heart garland hanging in my dining room. I have it hung up on the edge of curtain rods on both sides. And then I just evenly spaced the hearts out in between. So that wraps it up for our heart garland. If you have any questions on this video, just let me know. And if not, I'll see you back here soon. Thanks for following along.