Standing hearts

Learn how to make these delightful felt standing hearts this year for Valentine’s Day! This simple felt hearts craft is a quick, fun and easy way to subtly add some hearts around for the holiday!

I did a little decorating recently for Valentine’s Day, but before I show you the decor, I wanted to share with you this fun and easy standing hearts project.

If these adorable felt Valentine’s Day trees look a little familiar to you, then you are paying attention! I loved my DIY felt Christmas trees so much, that I decided to make some heart trees in a very similar fashion. Well, essentially the same way, but why recreate the wheel when something works, right?!

I love making felt projects for several reasons. First, it is available is so many colors so it is bound to match whatever color scheme you are decorating with. The second reason is that felt is very inexpensive! You can get a sheet of felt for one of these standing hearts for a quarter! When else can you decorate for cents? Lastly, felt is so easy to work with and very forgiving! It cuts like butter so a lot of times you can double it up to cut things out. And if you don’t cut right on the pattern line, it is very easy to trim to fix your mistakes.

I used my sugar mold again for displaying most of these heart trees, as you will see soon, but you could also just arrange them in a vignette. The shorter ones would also work perfectly on a three tiered tray styled for Valentine’s Day. You don’t even have to use them on a stand, as they look great just laying on their side as well! 🙂

Supplies to make felt standing 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.

Felt sheets in colors of your choice – I used the colors sandstone, cream, baby pink, coral, tomato red, red and cranapple, all from Hobby Lobby.
Hot glue gun and glue sticks
Scissors
Wood dowels
Wood craft rounds
Felt heart patterns (get below)
Straight Pins

Watch the quick video

Don’t want to read all the instructions? I have included a video in this post showing you how to make these DIY standing hearts. 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.

Print out the felt hearts patterns

The first step is to print out the felt standing hearts patterns onto regular paper. 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 paper/felt per standing heart.

How to make felt standing hearts

This tutorial shows how to make the larger standing heart, however, the smaller heart trees are made the same way. Once you have your heart patterns printed out, cut them into individual heart pieces.

Next take your felt sheet and on the long side, cut it into thirds equally. An easy way to do this without measuring is to fold the felt a third of the way and place the heart pattern to see if it fits there, then also check the remaining felt to see if you heart fits there too. If so, this is where you cut. You can see this process in the video. After you have three long strips, cut them in half to give you six squares.

Trim your heart patterns close to the line and pin it onto a felt square. This will help to ensure the felt doesn’t slip while cutting.

Using a pair of sharp scissors, cut out the heart following along the pattern line.

Remove the pin and trim the edges of any sharp points if needed. Continue this step until you have six hearts.

Assemble the 3D felt standing hearts

Starting with the first felt heart, add some hot glue along the perimeter and inside of one half of the heart as shown in the picture below. Cover this heart with another felt heart trying to keep all the edges lined up to make it completely symmetrical. Lightly press the hot glued area down to make sure it is adhered to the first heart. This will leave you with a stack of two hearts, with one half glued down.

For the next layer, fold back the unglued portion of the second felt heart, and add hot glue to the other half of the first felt heart. Add a third felt heart on top of the hot glue, again lining up the edges. This will leave you with two unglued halves sticking up in the middle.

Going forward, you will fold back all the top layers of felt hearts and add hot glue to the bottom one. Then add on another felt heart.

After you have added the last felt heart, you will glue the two unglued halves together. This will be the top most heart to the bottom most heart.

After the 3D felt heart is assembled, you may have to add some glue inside the top opening to get it closed as much as possible. I found that I was not able to close the top fully like I did with the felt Christmas trees, but that is not a problem. The 3D hearts still stay in place on the stands. Or you can leave them down a bit on the stand as that looks cute too! The bottom will have an opening which is where you will add the wood dowel for the stand, so you don’t want to glue that shut.

PREPARE SOME WOOD DOWELS AND WOOD ROUNDS

You will need to prepare some wood rounds by drilling a hole the same size as your dowels into the center of the circle. In this case, my dowels were 3/16″ in size. So Mr. Wonderful used a drill press to add some 3/16″ holes in the centers. If you don’t have a drill press, you can just use a regular drill too.

The wood dowels I got were 12″ long, which were too long, so I also had to cut those down. Using a small hack saw, I cut them in half to 6″ for smaller heart felt trees. For the larger standing hearts, I tried some different sizes to get varied heights. I cut some dowels to 8″, 9″ and 10″ long.

Add the 3D felt hearts to the tree stands

Take one of your wood dowels and insert it into the hole in the wood round. It might be a tight fit but you don’t want it to fall out. I did not need to add any glue to it. Next add a 3D felt heart onto the wood dowel using the opening on the bottom of the heart. Push the heart all the way to the top of the dowel. I did not add any glue to these either as I want to be able to remove the felt hearts later when storing them. They will be able to fold down flat and store easier that way.

Go crazy making Valentine’s Day trees!

This felt heart craft was so easy that you can make as many standing hearts as you want! Like I said, I made enough to go in my sugar mold and a couple extra to put around. I will share that with you next time!