Hanging Hearts Creative Threading Activity

Today I am teaming up with a posse of fabulous play bloggers to bring you a collection Valentine’s Day activities for kids of all ages – all great for play and learning they cover everything from science to alphabet awareness, maths and creativity. Be sure to read on to find links to all of the posts. As for me, I have a simple activity that gets little fingers busy being creative and developing fine motor skills.

To make your own Hanging Hearts

You will need:

• Plastic rectangles cut from 2 or 3 litre plastic milk bottles. I think pre-sealed laminating sheets would work well also.
• Sharpie permanent markers
• Scissors
• Hole punch
• Wool or embroidery thread
• Wooden beads
• Colourful feathers
• Hot glue gun or white craft glue
• Optional – a stick and cotton thread

To make:

1. I cut the rectangles of plastic from the sides of a used and washed plastic milk bottle using a utility knife and pair of scissors. We drew our hearts directly onto the plastic with the markers.

The Sharpie markers smudged a little but actually dry really quickly so it wasn’t an issue for us. Our hearts were inspired by our previous Kandinsky shapes activities and I reminded Immy to use up as much as the plastic sheet as possible so that we would have room to punch holes for the wool threading.

2. Cut your hearts out.

3. Punch holes around the outside of each heart.

4. Cut a length of wool (yarn) and place a small piece of tape around one end to make it easier for small hands to navigate the holes. Tape the other end to the back of your heart to hold it in place temporarily. Starting at the bottom of each heart we ‘sewed’ around our hearts, using an under and over ‘stitch’ for some of the hearts and a continuous over over ‘stitch’ on others (see below).

5. Tie off your wool ends. Place a small dab of hot glue (or white craft glue – it will work but is likely to take longer to dry) onto your knot and slide a wooden bead up along the thread to cover the knot.

6. Place a dab of glue on the end of a feather and push the pointed end up into the bead. Trim off any excess wool.

We thought our hanging hearts looked a little like dreamcatchers so we decided to tie them along a stick to hang above the bed. I used a yarn wrapped stick and white cotton thread to tie the hearts onto the stick.

Fun to make and gorgeous to hang!

Check out these out fabulous ideas for Valentines inspired play and learning;

• Cathy of NurtureStore created a great Valentine inspired math station.
• Kristina of Toddler Approved is sharing a fun textured heart alphabet sensory bin.
• Ana of Babble Dabble Do has a fun Magnetic Attraction experiment for you to try.
• Meri Cherry inspires us with her creative genius again – sharing a paper bag heart purse.