Heart Art

I found a cute tutorial online on how to make little heart suncatchers and I thought these would be fun to make for Kate and Maya's Grands for Valentine's Day.  I was wrong.  #youwinsome  #youlosesome

I found working with string and glue maddening.  And having to fit it to a pretty design is even more maddening.  You see, there's this perfectionist in me...and, well, that pretty much sums it up.

While I completed our annoying glue/string task, I was silently cursing to myself under my breath.  Note to self, projects that are going to take more than one day need to be seriously thought about...

These little guys turned out pretty and actually really cool but the frustration involved was not my cup of tea.  Add the fact that Kate wasn't nearly as interested as I had initially thought she would be and it was even more frustrating.  If we do make these again, I think we'll outline the design with glue and then lay the string down instead of soaking it in glue.  I'm not sure if this will work the same or not but it sounds easier than trying to manipulate a little string when your hands are sticky with glue.

The premise of this project involved printing the designs and
taping them on your table then taping a piece of wax paper on top
of them.

Then soaking a precut string in glue, squeezing
off the excess glue...

...And positioning the gluey string to your taped
template.

You then add a string for hanging later on.
This part was maddening too.  There was glue and
it was sticky and very challenging trying to make
it all look pretty.

You let this set up dry overnight and then you fill
in your areas with glue and color them with
watercolor paint.

This was the extent of Kate's interest.
[Cue steam coming from my ears now.]

You see, I don't push projects.  If Kate's not interested in doing something crafty, I don't force her to do it.  I don't want her to grow up loathing these types of things, but the fact that I had spent so much freaking time getting these strings set up and she only wanted to color two little tiny bits of one heart was challenging.  I ended up sitting down and putting the glue on, and asking Kate what color she wanted, and then I colored the rest in.

I only completed the two hearts.  If Kate wasn't interested, I didn't want to waste to much more of my own time.

We let these guys dry overnight again and then peeled them off of
the wax paper.  This project gets a 50%.  That's failing.

But they did turn out pretty against the window...and if Kate was
more interested and wanted to finish the other two hearts, I think
we would have used these for Valentines.

But she wasn't, and because her Valentines's to her Grands are going to be from her and not from me, we hung these two (three) hearts up in her playroom and called it a day.

Back to the Valentine drawing board...