Painted & Stitched Heart Cards

Well, January has seemed to fly by, and it will be February next week!
So it is time to be thinking about showing appreciation to those we care about. 

So whether you are into celebrating Galentines Day on the 13th or Valentine's Day on 14th February here is a painted and stitched idea!

I took a piece of well-washed cotton cloth (a piece of sheet to be honest) and stretched it on an old wooden frame. Three-Point pins are great for stretching the fabric to a frame, not causing tears, and come with a handy tool for removing them too, but you can use drawing pins.

I then had a play with three Markel Oil Sticks:  purple, light gold, and red. These look good on their own but will resist added paint too. They do sink into the cloth so don't rub off as you are stitching later.

I then used some batik dye powder I had mixed up in jam jars.
These are handy concentrated cold water fabric dyes and I mix up lots of different colours just from the three primary colours. You just dilute them to get pastel shades!
For an average jam jar, I dissolve 30g of table salt in a little hot water and then make it up to 250ml with cold water. You then add 5g (1 level tablespoon) of Batik Dye fixer powder and 1g (a quarter of a teaspoon) of the dye powder.

I painted these on the fabric making several hearts.

You can see here how I let the paints bleed as I was wanting a shabby-chic effect.

When the paint dries sandwich two layers of fabric with some wadding in the middle. 
You can secure this with a couple of pins but I used an embroidery hoop.

I used a couple of different embroidery thread colour and used running stitch around my painted lines.

I then trimmed the hearts and used double-sided tape to secure them to the front of cards. I'm not sure whether to leave them simple like this or whether to add a sentiment cut from the ribbon. What do you think? (Sometimes crafting on your own can seem lonely when you want another opinion, but here the online crafting community can be wonderful, so please do tell me in the comments what you think)

These heart cards also seem like a good idea for weddings and even thank you cards too!

I did make a heart-shaped padded shape too but haven't found the safe place I put my lavender to fill it with yet. I'll keep looking and will hopefully find it before February. It's nice to show yourself some love too and so I plan to put the scented heart in my wardrobe.