Valentine's Day Love Letters

Happy Valentine!

Here comes a nice little Valentine gift for those of you who like a fiddly job.

Love Letter How to

Material: 1 sheet of white paper
                oil pastels in various shades of red, orange, magenta, pink
                water colours in similar shades
                glue

• Cut out the template (which you can order here). Paint the heart parts with the oil pastels. Add a second layer in water colours covering pink with orange and vice versa. Let dry.
• Cut out all parts, clipping small triangles off the flaps of the heart shapes.
• Fold back all flaps. Do valley and mountain folds in the 'wall'-strips according to the shape of the letters and crease properly.
• Beginning with the letter 'L' spread little glue on all the flaps of the first L and onto the inner rim of the strip. Carefully put together, hiding the endflap of the 'wall'-strip inside. Let dry.
• Repeat the procedure with the second L and insert carefully. You might need to insert the corners and level cover and wall with the help of a knife, which is a bit tricky.
• Repeat the last two steps with the other letters and the heart. As you can imagine the 'E' and the 'V' are especially fiddly. Here you need a bit of patience.

You can also do lids for the boxes by enlarging the top cover and a strip of about 1 cm height and fill the boxes with small items like candy or coupons for treats as an additional surprise.

Dangling Ornaments

For this project I made some ornaments to decorate twigs from my garden with but which you could also hang in front of your window. I took dogwood twigs because I love their beautiful mahogany red bark.

How to:

Material: 1-2 sheets of white paper
                cardboard cylinders of different diameters
                glue
                white yarn (I used very thin cotton yarn for crocheting lace)

There are two different types of ornaments.

No. 1: Furry ornament

• Cut three squares for each ornament, about half a centimeter longer than the circumference of your cylinder (which should be 1 cm broad) and 3, 4 and 5 centimeter high.
• Now cut the heights in very thin strips (ca. 1 mm), working from the edges of the height to the center, leaving 1 cm uncut.
• Cut a piece of yarn about 25 cm long.
• Spread glue evenly around the cylinder and fix the ends of the yarn under the first strip of fringed paper, beginning with the widest of the three. Let dry thoroughly.
• Apply the next strip (middle width) and at last the narrowest.
• When it is completely dry, carefully ruffle the fringes to give it its 'furry' look.

 
No. 2: Wrap-around rings

• Cut strips of 3-4 mm width.
• Cut a piece of yarn about 25 cm long.
• Spread glue thinly on the whole strip and wrap thightly around the ring in two layers. Fix the ends of the yarn under the first wraps.
• You can leave them just like that or embellish them further by adding patterns of very thin cut paper strips (1mm) in different patterns or even some circles gathered from your hole punch.

I did not work too regularly when wrapping or cutting and ruffling the fringes to give the ornaments a more vivid appearance.

For easter I also intend to do some egg-shaped ornaments made of all shades of green paper. I will show them to you in time.