Christmas decoration

Christmas is such a special time of year for us and it seems right to decorate our home with decorations that remind us of the love that God showed us by sending His son into our world.

I saw these pretty decorations a while ago and have tried to recreate them in a simple and easy way. In fact they were so easy to make that I have made loads of them to use as tags, presents and decorations for our home. 

If you have a sewing machine this project will take you under 5 minutes to make. If you don't have a sewing machine you can either glue or hand sew the layers together rather than machine them.

All you need is an old book, some red felt, a scrap of old fabric, some ribbon and a button.

Draw a heart onto your old book pages. I have tilted the page before drawing my heart to make the writing go diagonally.

As you can see my heart is less than perfect. This project lends itself to a slap-dash approach, so don't worry if one side is higher or fatter than the other, it will add to the charm!

Lay the paper heart on your scrap of fabric. If you are uncertain about sewing directly onto the paper you may want to use a bit of paper glue to keep the paper in the right place on the fabric whilst you sew it.

Roughly sew around the paper with a bright red thread. As you can see I have not done this accurately (it really doesn't matter) so experiment with the sewing machine to achieve a simple line around the paper heart.

Once you have sewed it cut around the heart so you have a margin of the coloured fabric.

Line it up on the next page of the book and repeat the process, sewing around the coloured fabric onto the paper.

Again cut around the paper after you have sewed it down so it doesn't move whilst you are sewing it.

And finally for the back layer, which is red felt. Repeat the above processes - sewing then cutting out your final heart.

Here is the heart at this stage. It looks so pretty with the red thread breaking up the different textures.

Now to turn it into a useable decoration...

I have used a length of ribbon that I fix into place  behind the heart with the red thread. On the front I added a complimentary button to finish it off.

Happy Christmas to you!