It’s Day 28 – the last day of 28 Days of Hearts! I love this final piece in the series, using a satin stitch to create a heart made of thread within the paper heart. I used a gorgeous variegated indigo sashiko thread that has been waiting patiently in my stash of supplies for far too long.

For the final piece of the project, I am going to put together another stop motion video of all 28 hearts. Stay tuned!

I did a re-edit on the first version of my Day 27 heart (which I won’t share), and turned it into a three colour/three layer composition. It works so much better this way. (Trust me on that).

This is based upon my Seed Series body of work from a few years ago. I have two of the pieces available in my online shop.

For this Day 26 design I’d originally drawn a swirl of lines flowing across the entire heart shape. As I started cutting I realized this was too intricate for such a small piece of paper, so I selectively cut what I’d drawn on the back. The remaining uncut shape is sort of weird, but also wonderful.

Day 25 started as a paper cut only project, but once the cutting was done the shape no longer read well as a heart. I decided to collage patterned paper underneath the cut pattern. I love the combination of the two together.

I started the Day 24 heart working with blue gel pen on white card stock, and it just wasn’t working for me. The paper was not the right surface for the gel pen. I switched to a white gel pen on red paper and this time I was much happier with the drawing.

This drawing makes me think of elegant embroidery embellishments on clothing.

Day 23 came together in a snap. I immediately decided this 70s paper was the starting point of today’s collage, and then using the Bauhaus pattern seemed like the obvious choice for the second half of the heart. I really like the combination.

For Day 22, I was inspired by the work of Molly McGrath on the cover of The Papercraft Ideas Book, and created a composition of cutouts and collage.

I would love to do a variation of this in a more intricate way, and larger scale.

I decided to revisit paper embroidery again for the series, and went with bullion knots in blue thread for Day 21. I did not plan out what I was going to do beforehand so the design I came up with is a bit of an improvised mess, but I like it. 

Embroidering paper is unforgiving. Once you punch a hole through the surface to make a stitch, you’re committed, even if you misjudge the position of a stitch.

I had intended to use even more coloured paper in this composition for Day 20, but then making it started to feel too time consuming. I decided to leave sections of the white card stock, which is the base paper, showing through.

I try to limit the time I spend on these to an hour or under. Cutting, shaping, and positioning these pieces turned out to be surprisingly complex.