DIY Totorial: Lavender Hearts

After todays real wedding you should all know todays DIY Bride pretty well, as it is the lovely Bex whose beautiful wedding I featured this morning. Bex is one of my new recruits and will be a regular on the blog as she talks us through some of the amazing DIY projects she put together for her own wedding. Bex has taken to the whole DIY world like a fish to water and has even started off her own DIY Blog.

Today Bex is going to show us how to make Lavender Hearts, which she used at her own wedding as favours and decoration. They can be personalised to go along with your own colour scheme and look super cute!

Here’s Bex to tell us a bit more about herself…….

‘Hello lovely Boho readers, my name’s Bex and I’m a makaholic. I’m also a newlywed with an obsession for all things homespun, vintage and delicious.
I love to make things – dinners, scarfs, music, tea time treats, decorations, skirts, gifts, curtains… you get the idea. I have spent the past year producing all sorts of things for my own wedding and have been further bitten by the making bug in the process.  I’ve just made the leap from avid blog reader to blogger myself – check out my site for lots more ideas and to follow my homespun addiction into married life!  www.homespunhoney.co.uk’

My bridesmaids and I knocked up 80 of these as wedding favors for the girls who came to my wedding and they were huge hit – almost all of them were taken home despite cameras, jackets, phones and even shoes being left by the dancefloor wayside!

I used about 20 different fabrics for my own wedding and went for a wide variety of ribbons and buttons to keep everything mismatched, but you could of course make them up in one or two fabrics with coordinating trimmings for a more consistent look.

* You can buy the dried loose lavender at Lavenderworld
* You can buy the soft toy stuffing – HERE or use old wool scraps. I found buying stuffed cushions and using the insides much cheaper!

Time – Once you get on a roll, and if you’re using a sewing machine, you can fire these out pretty quickly – my bridesmaid and I made 40 in an afternoon, start to finish. Take the time to get properly set up and do the step for each heart before moving on to the next step, instead of doing them one by one all the way through – it’s much faster and you can get a production line going!

Step 1)  Fold your chosen fabric in half, right sides facing, and pin to keep it together. Use your template to draw several heart shapes onto the wrong side of your fabric – you’ll get more out of your fabric if you alternate the direction of the heart shapes. Cut round your hearts, keeping each set of two together.

Step 2)  Turn your hearts so that they are wrong sides facing and pin them together in the centre.

Step 3)  Using a matching or contrasting thread, sew around the outline of your heart, keeping a 0.5cm edge (I use the foot of my sewing machine) Stop sewing before you get all the way round, leaving a 4cm gap to stuff your heart.

Step 4)  Stuff your heart. I use a mixture of soft toy stuffing and lavender to get a plump heart without using too much lavender, but you can use all lavender if you prefer. Simply tease the stuffing with your figures to give it volume then stuff into the round sections of your heart. Create a cone by rolling up a piece of A4 paper and securing with tape – you can then use this as a funnel to get your lavender in. Alternate lavender and stuffing until you are happy with the shape – and smell! – of your heart.

Step 5)  Sew up the gap in your heart, leaving the same 0.5 cm edge. Cut off all the ends of your thread.

Step 6)  Use pinking shears to pretty up your edges – cut round the heart as close to the edge as possible to keep a nice shape.

Step 7)  Loop your ribbon and hand see onto the top of your heart, adding a button or bead in the centre.

And your done! repeat this process for as many hearts as you want to make, don’t they look cute!

Thanks so much to Bex for this wonderful tutorial, I think the hearts look gret and would be great decoration for any wedding or they would make a really lovely favour for your guests. Bex will be back in a few weeks time with another fab DIY tutorial.

You can read more from Bex on her Blog
www.homespunhoney.co.uk
TWITTER

Pictures from the hearts in my wedding by Tino & Pip photography: www.tinoandpip.co.uk

♥   You can find more DIY Tutorials HERE  ♥