A 2021 update and 10 year anniversary

Exactly ten years ago I had the idea to make a digital Advent calendar for my friends and family, after having made them silly, weave-it-yourself Christmas hearts for some years, as printed Christmas cards. I decided to post a new heart online every day from December 1st. to December 24th.

I wasn't quite sure how to do it, and decided on the Blogspot platform a bit randomly - since the interface was super easy to use and customize - and I had a VERY busy month, since I hadn't quite done 24 designs, when I began posting. I started out gently, on November 28th (see the very first post here), with a bit of a warm up. It was lots of fun, and the year after I had to repeat the whole thing with NEW designs, since lots of people insisted, that it was now a most important Christmas tradition!

In 2012, I had prepared a bit more, and posted a variety of paper DIY projects, not only the woven hearts. And gradually it became an actual blog, where I shared a lot of things I find joyful, from graphic design to architecture, fashion and paper art - to the small stories from my everyday life. But as a theme, all year round, I have posted fun paper projects you can print and make yourself, and always for free. I made a practical list of those posts right here - and the rest you can explore in my tag cloud to the left.

The concept is always the same: all you need is household printer paper, some scissors and glue and access to a printer. And the designs can't be too complicated to make - but I always add my own custom design to the printed templates. I love working with patterns and colors, so that's half the fun for me. Origami has become a central thing, and I never tire of looking for new fun ways of making simple, pretty paper decorations.

I don't have a philosophical take on any of this, but still: I would like to encourage you to do seasonal decorations yourself from cheap or repurposed materials, as opposed to buying a lot of new plastic stuff every year. And enjoy yourself while making them.

Blogging frequently became too impossible to combine with work and family, and from 2019 I haven't updated the blog. It will stay where it is, however - lot's of people are visiting still, and I like the idea of that. Recently I gave the blog an Instagram face and when I feel the urge to share a fun paper project in the future, it will happen there.

So why don't you follow @heartheartseason on Instagram?
And thank you for ALL your visits and feedback and sweet comments over the years. 

love, Tina

Some long overdue Easter greetings

This blog is full of excuses for long periods of silence, but - as mentioned before - I consider using Instagram as my communication platform instead, and keeping the blog as a kind of projects library? Well, all this is stuff I think of in spare time, of which I sometimes don't have much.
I'm sure my readers have exactly the same kind of everyday issues....

Easter is upon us, and I actually always feel like colours and flowers and letting all that light in through the windows again - and making pretty things as decorations for Easter parties, or to give away with Easter eggs. This year I made these simple butterflies, they are perhaps the most basic origami I have ever shared here. Great for kids to make, or for impatient types like me. Or you?

Get my simple one page tutorial right here

I made bundles of them, and stuck a bit of thin wire through them, and put them on branches from our cherry trees, and it looked very charming. I did a small origami workshop in my workplace at the book shop, and several kids came by and folded with great enthusiasm. We used origami paper from Djeco, as seen in the photo, since we sell their really cool line of paper products. 

But maybe you feel like revisiting some of my older spring projects? 

There were the Sakura flowerballs - also made in a Buttercup version.

Last year, I made these colorful pleated Easter Egg Lanterns - and many of you liked those Cheerful Little Birds.

You can use my tag cloud to explore, there are plenty more. 

Have a lovely Easter or - if you don't celebrate Easter - simply a lovely spring!

Merry Christmas + Happy New Year

Dearest readers, thank you for following this year's very low budget Christmas festivities on this blog. I do hope that some of the old posts we revisited were new to you, or just forgotten by you, and that some of it was useful.

All that remains is to simply wish you some happy holidays, whether they are about Christmas or something else - and may you have some well deserved rest, peace and quiet with someone that are dear to you.

Alt er love 

PS: I found this wonderful and wild Christmas tree on Pinterest - the photo is by Ellie Chavez.

Flaky Friday

We are not having a white Christmas here, that's for sure (and it is very rare), but this is a way of compensating: complicated looking (but easy to make) end three dimensional paper snowflakes. These are rather large decorations, and they look especially nice in a window, I think - plus they are the kind of pretty things you may want to leave there, even after Christmas. 

They are printed on heavy paper or card stock, and the trick is all about cutting slits and folding the pieces correctly, and these cool paper sculptures are quite simple to make. 

Everything is explained in this old post from 2016, and there is a photo tutorial as well.

So give them a try - or check out some of the other posts I have done on snowflakes, that are a bit of a thing for me, I guess...

Flat Fun Friday

As you know, I'm very fond of making Fröbel Stars, so much in fact, that I dedicated a lot of hours, trying to describe and demonstrate as many variants as I know, in this post, an absolute go-to spot for Fröbel enthusiasts. 

Because I like making them, I buy lots of those ready made strips, that are so abundantly available in the Christmas season here in Denmark. They come in so many pretty patterns and colors, and I have amassed quite a boxful. 

So, I like to play around with them, and come up with alternative ways of using them. These Flat Weave Stars I originally made in 2013. Back then I made special color/pattern strips for them (you can still download and use those, of course). 

The ones in these photos, I made last night, from some of the different Fröbel strips I had. Because a Fröbel star needs four strips, you eften end up with 'leftovers' in certain designs, and these are just made from a mix of whatever was there.

For each of these you'll need eight half length strips. 

Here is the original post from 2013, with a photo tutorial on how to make them. Fun and easy!

The tutorial explains the very simple principle, and the easiest way to make them (the folded strips laid out flat on the table and then woven, hence the name). I made them with 2 x 4 strips, but you could make them larger, smaller, or not even square - experiment, and have a happy Advent 3rd!

Update - I made this last one, seen below, and I thought it might be nice to add that image as well.

As you can see, this was made with 2 x 6 strips, and you could make them very large, as long as the number is even, and the strips have a little extra length for maneuvering. They're quite fun to make!

It's Concertina Friday!

Today's blog throwback is all about concertina folding, as I like to call it. Something I like to do, even though it can be a bit fiddly to turn into a flat, round ornament - but with a bit of patience and practise it is super easy. It's perfect for gorgeous flowers and stars, I think, and it doesn't involve a lot of thinking or complicated folding sequences - all you have to do is make a whole lot of really, really sharp and even folds. 

The Solino Stars (top) and the Dip Dye Flowers (middle) are both from 2013. They both include a perfectly finished design to download, which you only have to print, cut and fold. Both blog posts have a few bits of practical advice on the how-to.

The Gold Stars (bottom) post from 2016 is a kind of tutorial in itself, explaining the easiest way to make something like this - tried and perfected by me, and it involves making a little tool for super quick and accurate folding. These gold ones are made from thin, glossy gift wrap, which I find particularly suited for this kind of folding.

Have a lovely weekend, everybody!

Have a Heart on Advent 1st

Let's kick December off (well, almost) with one of the very first designs I made for this blog: The Countdown Heart from 2011, from the original Advent Calendar format, where I posted a new heart every single day in December (all of them woven hearts, as these are a traditional and very old Danish Christmas decoration). I was on maternity leave and had more time for blogging back then!
You can read a bit about weaving hearts here. I also made a simple one page tutorial.

Here's the original post from 2011, with the design to download as well, of course. 

But I wanted to post an origami heart as well, and I found that these (seen on the dark background in the photos), originally made for Valentine's in 2017, are great for Christmas as well. They can be used as gift tags, mini Christmas cards or made into a really cool garland (see photo - they have a natural slit on one side, that you use for the ribbon) - and if you punch a hole for a bit of string, you could decorate your tree with them. 

They are super easy to make, and a fun origami design - note: made not from a square paper, but from a rectangular one. Which is why I did a whole series of measured papers, ready to cut and fold, in a lot of funky red / pink / coral patterns. 

You will find the original post here, with free tutorial + pattern paper to download. 

This is what the Countdown Heart looks like (below), before you weave it - and if you have never woven a Christmas heart before, now would be the perfect time to start!

You will find loads of more or less crazy heart designs, and some nice ones too, on my list here, especially from 2011.

 

Multi Color Friday

Back in 2014, I made this very large and colorful paper bauble for the blog.

It's a very simple design, a sphere made from twenty circular paper units, each of these folded into a triangular shape (and as usual, to make it as easy as possible, I even made the folding lines for you). 

A really fun and intriguing construction, and one that could easily be made in any kind of slightly sturdy paper, that might take your fancy - but I liked the idea of a patchwork multi-pattern bauble. Now, to un-celebrate the ghastly Black Friday, lets give it a rerun this year!

Here is a link back to the original post from December 2014, with a series of step-by-step images, explaining how to make it (all you need is scissors and glue), and of course, the link to the original design PDF. 

Throwback Christmas project # 1: The Big Patchwork Bauble

Christmas! Not quite as usual, but don't you worry.

My dearest readers and visitors here on heartheartseason - it's been one of those years, where everything has been under investigative consideration...

What could be different? Where am I going? Should I make a big job/career change? Or some other changes? Big things, small things.

The blog has been among these - as you who are familiar with it knows, it's not my day job or anything even close to that.

I do my paper projects at random times, they pop out of nowhere and sometimes they take physical shape immediately, other times they get sort of filed, to be worked on later. I never know when the urge comes over me - and to plan for a Christmas season with a handful of cool projects, is actually a huge job. It's meant to look easy and whimsical, but of course hours of design work, planning and photography - and then uploading and writing - comes before every paper DIY post! This year it just hasn't been possible.

I love doing them, however. I really do! But I have thought about moving the visual part and the community part of this blog over to Instagram (where you can visit my personal feed, and where I love to post about memorable and nice things in my everyday life) - and then simply keeping a kind of library and storage space for the actual DIY-files on some other online platform.

I just don't know? This blog has around five to ten thousand visits per month these days, something I am very honored and proud of, and I can see from statistics that people visit my DIY posts a lot. That makes me SO happy! Would you follow this blog on Instagram? Would the content work there?
Comments are most welcome!

But anyhow, what's that image above got to do with any of that?

Well, a lot of this year has been focused on looking for work, within my professional life: as a graphic designer and overall marketing person. I have been moderately successful and have made a couple of really nice projects, and have even been studying a bit. But a new job is yet to be found. 

In the meantime I have taken a temporary but very full time job in a big local book shop, as a holiday season extra pair of hands. I'm starting tomorrow and I think it's gonna be FUN. It's something completely different, and I need that so much.

And Christmas on the blog?

I promise you this.... Every Friday from late November, I will do an inspirational greatest hits recap of some of the older projects - some of them you will have totally forgotten, or maybe never seen before. I will try to theme them a bit, and hope you will enjoy them. Till then!

Sophie Smallhorn

Earlier this summer, when I took one of my rare strolls down our inner city walking street Strøget, a shop window really made me stop. Now, it was in a shop I usually check out, but this was different!

It turned out to be this really cool creative collaboration between British artist and visual concept maker, Sophie Smallhorn, and the Swedish fashion brand COS. 

In flagship COS stores in Copenhagen, Hong Kong, Seoul, London and Los Angeles, Sophie Smallhorn made site specific window displays with these stacked, geometric color forms - basically taking up a lot of window space and thus upstaging the clothes completely, but with such wow effect, that it had the exact opposite effect.

If you know a bit about COS's particular kind of colorful minimalism, the windows worked like an abstract depiction of the brand DNA. So brilliant and so beautiful.

Above, the shops in Copenhagen, Seoul, London and Honkong (couldn't find the L.A. one).

These displays are based on a series of small and quite delicate wall hung acrylic and aluminium sculptures - a theme she has worked on for a number of years - only in an enlarged version.

Her graphic and sleek style just makes me jump with joy, see much more of her work here, and she proves to me yet again, that playfulness and orderliness are not necessarily adversaries!

Here are a couple of examples of her 'Components' sculptures:

And here's a nice little story to end this post with....

I snapped a picture of the Danish window and posted it on Instagram. I saw a suggested hashtag in the window (check it out: #cosxsophiesmallhorn), and used it, to properly credit this fine work.

I actually didn't notice, or only vaguely so, anyway, that I entered a competition - and only found out, when COS contacted me, and told me I had won two Sophie Smallhorn prints!

Yayeee!! I am picking them up next week, and they look like this. Lucky me, don't you think?
Maybe I should start buying lottery tickets?