Sunday, December 19, 2010

Greeting Card Heart (and ribbon tree) Ornaments

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In my continuing quest to justify saving greeting cards as craft supplies I thought I would see if I could make a four strip heart from greeting cards.

In order to fit the strips on a greeting card I had to cut them smaller than the ones that I had seen. All of my strips are one inch wide. Two are 6 inches long and two are four inches long.

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Because I wanted to use double sided tape or glue, not staples, to hold my ornaments together I scored a line 3/8 of an inch from one end of each strip.

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On the front side (coloured side) of one of the long strips I covered about 1 and 1/2 inch of the unscored end with double sided tape. Then I folded my 9 inch hanging string and centred it on the double sided tape.

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I placed the other long strip, front side down, on the strip with the glue and pressed the two strips together. .

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I folded the scored ends of the long strips.

Experience told me that I should "condition" the shorter strips so that they would roll rather than fold when I bent them. To do this I gently rolled them onto an empty thread spool that was about 3/4 inch in diameter.

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Then I folded the scored end and placed double sided tape on the other ends.

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Next I stuck the two short strips to the longer strips.

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I used more double sided tape to stick the scored end of the short strips to the other end.

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Finally I used more double sided tape to stick the scored end of the long strips to the base of the heart.

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Note. If I hadn't had any double sided tape I would have used a fast drying glue and at each step I would have pressed the glued sections together with clothes pins until the glue was dry.

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Second Note. The card stock paper used for my second heart was a little thinner than the card stock in the first heart. I found that the shorter strips were less inclined to crease than for the first heart. I probably should have made the strips for the first heart (thicker card stock) a little longer.

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When I laid out two of these ornaments like this I had another thought.

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If I used a different coloured cards and added one or two more strips...

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... I could make an ornament that looks like a Christmas tree.

So days later I gave it a try. Because the third loops would be too long to cut from greeting cards I decided to use corsage ribbon instead. And since I was no longer limited by the size of the cards I could make each of the three hearts from a single piece of ribbon. The ribbon is 1/4 inch wide and I cut three pieces. They are 8 inches, 12 inches and 16 inches long. I folded each one at its midpoint ...

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... and tucked them inside each other so that the folds were together, the smallest one was on the inside and the largest one was on the outside.

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Then I tucked the loose ends of the shortest then next longest then longest ribbons into the centre to make three hearts.

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The ribbon was very springy so I applied glue to the inside surfaces and then held it together with a clothes pin until the glue was dry.

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Then I glued two sequins to the outside and used a needle to thread my hanging thread through the sequins.

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Then I tried it again but with some wider, and greener, grosgrain ribbon. This ribbon was much less springy and I was able to skip the glue. Instead I temporarily stuck some pins through the layers until I had sewed the buttons in place. (I wish I had a couple of slightly smaller white buttons.)

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It was only when I had the two tree side by side that I notice that I had cut the longest green ribbon a little shorter than I had intended. It is only 14 inches long.

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Pinwheel 2010

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