How to sew a heart

Learn how to sew a heart with this simple tutorial! Don’t be scared away by the sewing aspect, I make it very clear and easy to show you how to make these cute fabric hearts!

With Valentine’s Day right around the corner, I wanted to share these adorable DIY fabric hearts with you, but really you could decorate with these hearts all year long. This tutorial easily walks you through the steps on how to sew a heart and by the time you are done, you will be an expert! 🙂

My fabric hearts are made out of vintage looking fabric because I decorated my dining room in a vintage Valentine’s Day theme this year. I will be sharing that with you soon! I found all my fabric at Hobby Lobby, however, you could use any color or pattern of fabric to make these DIY hearts. You don’t need a lot of fabric either, I bought 1/4 yard of each of these four fabrics and had more than half of each leftover. This would be a great project to use up those fabric scraps!

You can color coordinate them to any room in your house, including a nursery or little kid’s room. I think they would look so cute in a wooden bowl for decor on the counter in the bathroom too! The options are endless!

Don’t worry if you don’t have great sewing skills either. If you can follow a line, you can sew these fabric hearts! There is a little hand sewing to do at the end for finishing off the heart, but it is really simple to do. I have not traditionally been a fan of hand sewing, but I am becoming more adept at it, so it is not as intimidating to me as it once was. 😉

I made about 10 of these hearts in one afternoon, so they do not take too much time to make either. You can make as many or as few as you want! Just put on your favorite show or music to watch/listen to and you are good to go!

WATCH THE QUICK VIDEO

Don’t want to read all the instructions? I have included a video in this post showing you how to sew a heart. If you can’t see the video, turn off your ad blocker. Also, if you ever want to slow down the video, just click on the three dots in the lower right hand corner of the video and you can change the playback speed. If you want more detailed instructions, continue reading.

Supplies to make fabric hearts

*There are links to products in this post that I use or are similar to products I use. If you buy something from one of these links, I may make a small commission (with no additional cost to you) from the purchase. I will not recommend anything that I would not buy myself.

Fabric of your choice or fat quarters like these
Heart templates (see below)
Scissors
Poly-fil
Coordinating thread and needle
Straight Pins

Print out the heart templates

The first step is to print out the hearts templates onto a piece of card stock. These are the same heart patterns that I used for my standing felt hearts, so there are some extra hearts on each sheet. You will only need one heart, but you can keep the rest for another project. 🙂 When you are printing, make sure you print this pattern at 100% to make sure the size is correct. Every printer is different so just make sure your settings are not set to ‘fit to page‘ or that the box is not checked letting your printer make changes.

I made two different sizes of hearts. The larger heart is 4” wide and the smaller heart is 3” wide. For both sizes of hearts, I used 1 sheet of card stock.

Cut out and trace the heart template

Next, cut out one of the hearts from each size of heart templates.

Once you have your heart templates cut out, you will trace one onto the wrong side of your fabric. Don’t trace the heart right at the edge of the fabric, leave a little space around the heart. We will not be cutting the heart out right on the line but about 1/4 inch around that.

To save time and energy, I doubled over my fabric (with right sides together) and pinned it before cutting the heart out. This automatically gives you two sides for your heart. To do this, cut the fabric double the length of your heart to ensure you have enough fabric. If you have an all over pattern, like the one below, you don’t have to worry about how you cut the fabric.

However, if your fabric has horizontal lines/patterns that you want to line up on each side of the heart, you will have to pay attention to how you cut the fabric. You can watch how I did it in the video with a pattern that I wanted to line up on each side. I realize that this way wastes a bit of fabric, but it made the project quicker.

Cut out the fabric heart pattern

Instead of cutting on the line, we will cut around the heart about 1/4″ away from the line. This leaves the line for us to follow when sewing and makes the project not only easier to sew, but the heart shape looks much better doing it this way as well! You can stick a pin through the center of the heart to keep the two panels together, if that makes you more comfortable while sewing.

Now comes the not so hard part, the sewing. 🙂 I started sewing about 1/2″-3/4″ above the point of the heart, going towards the point. Make sure you backstitch when you start sewing! Now just take it slow and easy and follow the line with your needle. When going around curves, you have to sew a couple stitches, stop, then raise your presser foot enough to move the fabric a bit so you can line up your line again. Then sew a couple more stitches, and repeat. It sounds more tedious than it is. Again, you can watch the video to see how I do it.

Keep sewing around the heart until you come to the side you started on. Do not sew all the way to the starting point though. You want to leave an opening to add the Poly-fil stuffing. Stop sewing about 1″-1.5″ away from the starting point. Again, remember to backstitch your end point. Otherwise your stitches will come out when you are stuffing the heart.

Once you are done sewing, you will have to turn your heart right side out. Start pushing the fabric through the opening until it is all through. Next, take your finger or a closed pen to press out all the edges of the heart. Make sure to get the curves and corners well.

Start inserting stuffing into your fabric heart. Use small bunches of stuffing at a time and make sure you get it up into the corners well. You will use more stuffing than you think. You want the heart to be fairly plump.

Hand sew the heart closed

To close the heart, you will have to hand sew the opening shut. I used a ladder stitch to make the seam resemble the machine sewn seams as close as possible. You can see this in the video, but if you need further instruction, just google how to sew a ladder stitch. 😉 This was my first attempt below, but I definitely got better as I went along. LOL

After that, my DIY fabric heart was finished. Hooray! I really like how they turned out, especially seeing other fabric hearts online. I did not see a tutorial like this, most of them had the stitches and seams showing on the outside of the heart which I was not a fan of. So I thought I would try it a different way… I think it was a success. What do you think?

Decorate with your fabric hearts

Now all that is left to do is to decorate with your fun little hearts. These would be great vase fillers or you could even make them into a garland similar to how I did with my fabric mushroom garland.

These would be great as wedding decorations as well! You could make them in your wedding colors and place them all over the tables. You could have a craft night with some friends and family and you could whip up a bunch in no time! 🙂

Do you feel like you sufficiently know how to sew a heart now? You can do it, I promise! All that is left to do it try! I will be back next week to share my Valentine’s Day decor with you. Chat soon!