Happy Day after Valentine’s Day. I was saving this post to closely coincide with yesterday.
Sometimes winter can get to you and you feel so unmotivated to create anything. I sometimes force myself to go into my craft room and peruse everything just to get myself in the mood to make something. It was one of those types of days recently and I was looking at all the different prepped wood pieces that I have to choose from. There are numerous different wood slices, larger wood plaques, pallet signs and these larger spruce hearts.
If you recall, last year I cut a couple of those hearts in half, painted them with blue water colour and hung them above the fireplace. Another heart we torched to see how the wood grain would come out.
At that time, I had prepped a number of hearts but these two were the only projects I had tackled at the time.
I was recently in the mood for wood burning so I decided to plan a few different patterns that I wanted to put on some of these hearts.
As you can see below, all of the hearts are a different shape. Some thicker, some narrower as it all depended on where the crack in the wood slice was when I cut them out.
This one is very narrow.
My first idea was to make consistent curved lines and then inside put different shapes and patterns.
The next heart I decided to try was one with a spiral. I burned the lines and then chose some complementing paint colours. This heart has a nice even heart shape but still a slight crack in it.
You know how I love to burn words so I decided to go with these from 1 Corinthians 13: 4-8.
When you just add text, it allows the wood grain to show through.
My husband’s cousin recently passed away and I decided to burn a heart for his aunt.
This dinner plate shows how big the hearts are.
From slicing the log with a chain saw, sending each slice through the drum sander over and over and sanding again with the orbital sander, these hearts take a lot of prep. For me, having the hearts on hand to burn on dark cold winter days, makes all that prep feel worthwhile. More often than not, I find that it is the wood speaking to me that helps motivate me into starting my next project.
It is nice having a choice for any craft, because we can get bored doing the same over and over again. Your Grandma didn’t seem to mind, crocheting the same pattern, but using different colours.
I know even I found excitement in choosing different colours. 😘