Woven Paper Hearts

I spent a lot of time this last week fiddling with making woven paper hearts. These heart shapped baskets are traditional Scandinavian decorations, especially around Christmas that are used to hold candy or Pebernödder (Danish cookies) and are hung on the Christmas tree or around the house. The simplest heart, which is also the one you see most often, is on the bottom left of this picture.

I really liked the idea of making these decorations myself for our home, so I found this great website put up by a Danish fellow with dozens of different designs and have done 14 of them so far. I'm not sure that I'll be able to do any that are much more difficult that the ones shown here, especially without a compass or printouts from the patterns he has online.

The Danes will only really make these of red and white or red and silver or red and gold (playing off their national flag), but I decided to use various colors. Eventually I want to have 25 of them and use them for an advent calendar of sorts for Ruby. I can hang them up on a line of ribbon and have a treat and verse(s) to enjoy for each day leading up to Christmas. My Grandma used to always give us an advent calendar or two growing up and my sisters and I would argue over who got to open it each day even if it was just a picture and a verse inside. For as long as they last the hearts will remind us of our time here in Denmark.