Making Valentine Heart Ornaments: DIY
Happy Valentine's Week! To prepare our home for the special day, I created heart ornaments to hang in my trees and chandeliers (as seen in the last post, Valentine Trees). These heart ornaments are wonderfully fun to make, last forever, and don't even require a special trip to the store. Below are the materials and step-by-step directions to make approximately 45 hearts.
What You'll Need:
Large mixing bowl
1.5 to 1.75 cups Water
1 cup Salt
4 cups Flour
Toothpick
Paperclips
Baking Sheet
Foil
Paint or spray-paint of your desired color
Paint brushes
Newspaper
Ornament hooks or ribbon
Pre-heat the oven to 300 degrees.
In a large mixing bowl, add the water, salt, and flour together. Mix until dough forms into large clumps, as pictured above. Add a little more water as desired to make the dough more malleable.
Next, cover a baking sheet with a piece of foil.
Taking a pinch of the dough, roll it into a ball and begin to mold the ball into a heart. A toothpick will help to press the top of the heart into a valley. Once the heart is formed, place a paperclip into the center top of the heart. This will create a hook for displaying the heart later on.
Place the heart onto the foil. Repeat until the baking sheet is filled with hearts!
Place the baking sheet in the oven and bake for one hour at 300 degrees. The hearts will rise slightly and become more rotund. (You may need to do several batches depending on how many hearts you create.)
After taking the baking sheet out of the oven, let the hearts cool for about 30 minutes. Sometimes, my hearts would crack a little on the back. If that happens, just take some extra dough and fill in the cracks, smoothing them out.
Once they have been baked, the hearts may still be slightly soft in the middle. Wait until they are completely firm (up to 24 hours) until you begin the next step.
Now it's time to paint and decorate the hearts however you want! Here, I kept my hearts simple, spray-painting some of them gold (above) on a bed of newspaper, and painting some of them red with acyclic paint and a paintbrush.
When I made these hearts growing up, I would paint faces on them or glue sequins to them...whatever floated my boat! Now, they're a bit more sophisticated :)
Attach a ribbon or ornament hook (used here) to hang the hearts from chandeliers, branches, or trees. It can also be beautiful to simply fill a pretty bowl with these hearts.
This bright red brings a jolt of color to my dining room!
These gold hearts are coupled with barely pink glass ornaments, creating a subtle, lovely display on my foyer table.
A view of my last post with
on my mantle. I love these hearts, and I hope you will, too!
Happy Decorating, and thank you for visiting Nora's Nest!!
XOXO,
