Rag Heart Ornaments with Pipe Cleaners and Fabric Strips

Here’s a great way to use up colourful, leftover fabric scraps!  You can make these adorable rag heart ornaments quickly and easily with a few fabric strips and some pipe cleaners.

With Valentines Day just around the corner, we’ve been busy making lots of cute and easy Valentines day crafts.  Today we’re making some sweet little rag Valentines ornaments with pipe cleaners and fabric strips, and the process is very simple. Your child can use these ornaments as as gift toppers, give them away to friends or hang them in their bedroom.

I love crafting with leftover fabric. I’ve made dozens of quilts and baby blankets over the years, and I can never bear to part with the leftover scraps.  They’re just too pretty to throw away. I stash all of my fabric leftovers in a storage bin, and that way, we always have bright and colourful scraps of felt, flannel, fleece and cottons to craft with here in my home daycare.

Related: Fabric Scrap Christmas Cards.

The inspiration for today’s fabric-wrapped hearts came from these rag star ornaments we made several years ago.  We used strips of flannel and old tee shirts for our star ornaments, but for our hearts today we’re using left-over strips of quilting cotton and poly-cotton.

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To make our rag heart ornaments, you’ll need:

• pipe cleaners (one for each heart that you’re making)
• heart-shaped cookie cutter
• strips of leftover fabric (cotton, poly-cotton, flannel and tee-shirt all work well)

Making your ornaments:

We started things off by shaping the pipe cleaner hearts for our ornaments.

We used a heart-shaped cookie cutter for this.  We pressed a pipe cleaner around the edge of the cookie cutter, and where the two ends met up, we twisted them together to secure our heart shape.

While my hooligan was busy making pipe cleaner hearts, I was tearing my fabric into strips.  You can cut your strips as well.  Our strips varied in length but were all about 1/4 inch in width.  Don’t worry about the frayed edges.  They add to the rustic charm of these ornaments.

Wrapping your hearts:

Start where the two ends of the pipecleaner are twisted together, place one end of your fabric against the pipe cleaner, and begin wrapping.  Your first couple of wraps will trap that starting piece in place.

Continue to wrap your fabric strips around and around the pipe cleaner, moving along the pipe cleaner a wee bit with each wrap.

You want to trap a bit of the previous wrap under each new wrap of the fabric to eliminate any spaces where the pipe cleaner can peek through.

This process is great for helping kids develop their fine motor skills and hand-eye co-ordination.

Your fabric strip may switch from right side to wrong side as you wrap.  That’s ok, but if you prefer, you can keep your fabric facing right-side-out as you work.

When your pipe cleaner heart has been completely covered with fabric, leave a long “tail”, and knot that tail snugly against the pipe cleaner to prevent the fabric from unravelling.  This tail will serve as something to hang your ornament from, or in our case, we’ve knotted two tails so that each ornament is a pair of hearts.

If your pipe cleaner lost it’s shape a bit during the wrapping process, just shift and adjust a little here as needed.

That’s all there is to it.  Wasn’t that a quick and easy process?

If you have an abundance of fabric scraps you could make a huge assortment of heart ornaments in various colours and patterns!  You could make all kinds of shapes too!

If you enjoyed this craft, you may also like:

• Fabric Strip Valentines Cards
• Ribbon Heart Valentines Cards
• Paper Plate Quilt
• Kids Craft Apron (from a denim pant leg)
• Best Bib Ever (from a denim pant leg)

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