Grandpa's Heart

I wanted to share another project that I recently completed using items I received from my grandma's house that we were able to pick from. In the third stall garage of their house grandpa had his 'shop'. We were able to take home a few tools that we have put to great use already...mostly Mike doing the 'man' work for me. :) I decided to take a few old hearts that grandpa had cut out years ago. I have great memories of getting the hearts from grandma and grandpa for us to paint, color, or whatever we wanted to do to them. We spent many afternoons decorating hearts for ourselves, mom, grandma and just for the heck of it! It helped that mom had an entire cupboard full of paint and paintbrushes for us to use!

Deciding how to use the hearts was simple - I wanted to paint them, like years earlier, but obviously with a more steady hand! On Etsy, I had seen a Valentine's Day decor piece for sale and thought that I could easily make a similar piece with grandpa's hearts. 

Here is the process!

Items/tools needed:

• 3 wooden hearts
• 3 small wooden dowels (mine came from Wal-mart in the kid's craft section)
• 2" x 12" x 1/2" piece of wood, roughly (mine came from grandpa's scrap pile)
• craft paint (I used red and off-white)
• sand paper
• hot glue gun
• drill

The process was very easy. It can be done in any order but this is just what worked for me. I started off by painting all sides of the hearts. I did one heart using the red paint. The other two hearts I mixed the red with the off-white to create different hues of red/pink.

In the meantime, I had Mike cut the bottom stands out of the piece of wood and I used garden shears or branch cutters (don't know the technical term) to cut the dowels to staggered heights. The smallest heart had the least wide base, whereas the largest hard had the widest base. I just eyeballed what looked best. 

Now that the hearts were dry, I used the sand paper to roughen the edges of the hearts for a rustic feel. Then once again, my dear husband helped out by drilling holes in the bottom of the hearts and in the bottom stands for the dowels.

Once we had all the pieces cut, I put everything together using my best friend...my hot glue gun! I put a little glue in each hole and inserted one end of the dowel into the bottom of the heart and the other end in the matching base. Let the glue dry and then time for more paint!

After everything was dry and assembled to my liking I painted the dowel and the base black. Once dry, I used the sand paper to roughen the edges of the base like I did with the hearts...and VOILA!

There you have a new piece of decor for Valentine's Day! You can add glitter to the hearts or anything else you wish but I felt less was more in this case. The hearts will continue to remind me of my grandpa and the days spent with my sister's 'crafting!'