3-D heart mobile from recycled magazines

To keep the Girls occupied at Granny’s house recently, we cut out lots of hearts from the December edition of various magazines. This was a great opportunity to hunt through for reds and pinks and glittery gold pages, so a good exercise in colour-identifying for Dimples. The Girls also worked on co-ordination and general motor skills feeding the paper into the heart cutters.

Whilst it was a super activity, I’ve since been puzzling what to do with my hearts. A recent conversation with Fuss Free Flavours‘ Helen, and I knew what to do.

Firstly, I got out the sewing machine. I put two hearts together and ran them through the machine, from top to bottom in the centre of the heart, on a regular stitch. I made strings of 2, 3 and five hearts in a column, until i had used them all up. Conveniently enough this gave me five strings of hearts to use on my mobile. I trimmed the bottom threads from the heart strings but not the top.

Next, I formed a cross from two old pencils, and taped them in place. Then I covered the whole X shape in my favourite Dots and Spots tape, so it looked all spotty.

Then, I hung the strands of paper hearts on the X, with the shorter strings on the outer arms and the long one in the centre. I used more tape to secure the strings at the end of each arm.

Once that was done, I found some ribbon to tie around the centre of the X and suspend it.

Lastly, I folded each pair of hearts out so that the four flaps of paper created a 3-D heart.