Beading Heart

From LoveToKnow Crafts

There’s just something using a beading heart. They are simple designs but can be interpreted in so many different ways that it is a lot of fun to design, decorate and give gifts with hearts.

A popular and fun way to craft with hearts is to design and craft beaded hearts that can be added to other crafts or enjoyed on their own.

An Overview of Beaded Heart Designs

If you’re looking for basic instruction on how to bead a heart, check out this Japanese site, which has good drawings of the process of making an open heart (open because there’s a hole in the middle, it’s not a fully beaded heart).

This is a great little project because it requires very few beads, just 64 fire polished beads and 92 seed beads. That makes it pretty inexpensive, so you’ll want to make a bunch of these in different colors once you get the technique down.

The site also features a pattern for a cute closed heart, which you could easily make into a pendant. We’ll talk more about how to use these beading hearts a little later.

Another good project with excellent illustration is found at Rings & Things. This little pattern makes a set of heart-shaped earrings, but you could easily use these little darlings for decoration in other ways.

If you know the basics of peyote or loom beading, you can create a really cute wall hanging courtesy of Beadie Friends. This piece could be done in colors to match your décor and would look nice framed and sitting on a desk or the kitchen counter.

And if you love wire, don’t miss this exciting pattern from Woman’s Day, which uses different colors and thicknesses of wire to create a free-form heart and different sizes of beads to randomly decorate it. This is a wonderful project because it allows you to express your creativity even more than following a traditional pattern would.

Using your beaded hearts

As mentioned earlier, beaded hearts are versatile accessories. Not just for Valentine’s Day, they provide a cute decorating touch in any home decorated in the country style.

You can add beaded hearts to jewelry, such as the earrings above, or by making a pendant out of the heart, using it on a necklace or bracelet, or even just attaching a pin of some sort to wear it as a brooch.

A string of beading hearts could be used as a keychain, or one heart could be made the end of a ribboned bookmark (that would be the end that hangs outside of the book). Put one on your purse to celebrate Valentine’s Day, or use them to decorate gift boxes, bags or greeting cards any time of year.

If you really love hearts, you could bead a bunch in different colors, tie them to different colored ribbons, and make them into an interesting ornament for your rear-view mirror. Use a bunch of flat hearts (like those in the earring pattern) to decorate a picture frame or mirror. Or use them on scrapbook pages, to decorate greeting cards, or wherever your imagination takes you.

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