Heart Felt Coaster

Project Pinterest 04

I had enough. One too many times I sat by my computer with a drink that left a ring of condensation on the table beside me. Time for a coaster! So I went onto Pinterest to see what I might make.

I found a nice tutorial for a coaster made of felt with a thread crochet edging. That seemed like just the ticket. It's been quite a lot of years since I attempted thread crochet. I found it really difficult to hold the small hook and keep enough tension on the thread to make nice even stitches. But it's been over 30 years since I tried, so it was worth another attempt.

Only, being Margaret, I didn't want to make a simple circular coaster. It needed to be a heart, right? Back on Pinterest, I looked through my pins and found a design I'd been meaning to try with paper -- a woven heart. Why not make it from felt instead? Why not indeed. I found the instructions and set to work, trying it with scrap paper first.

It took several tries to create a correctly-sized oval. Mine is about 9-1/2 inches long by 3-1/4 inches wide. the slits are about 3/4 inches apart. Then it took a couple more tries to make the weave work. I needed directions that were more clear than those provided. I finally noodled it out, though. I chose two shades of red craft felt for the ovals. I cut the ovals and made the slits.

Then wove them together.

Because I wanted the coaster to have a similar thickness in all parts of the heart, I measured around the "humps" of the heart and cut two semi-circles of felt to add a third layer.

I used white glue to adhere the semi-circles in place between the front and back of the heart.

I also wanted to make the coaster more stable, so decided to sandwich a piece of card stock inside the felt heart. I traced the heart onto a piece of card stock.

Then trimmed about 1/4" inch off the edge, and inserted the card stock into the heart. Were I to do this project again, I think I might use perforated plastic or needlepoint plastic mesh as the insert instead of card stock. Those materials are a bit more rigid than the card stock. Plus, since they are plastic, will likely hold up over time better than card stock which will likely get wet over and over and eventually break down.

From this point, I followed the directions from the original instructions. I did need to alter them slightly because my heart shape required me to stitch the blanket stitches closer together than the circle in the example.

Also, because of the crochet cotton I used and the size of hook that worked, I used two single crochets and one double crochet in the blanket stitch foundation row.

The for the final row that creates the scallop, I used five double crochets instead of the eight called for in the tutorial.

I am extraordinarily pleased with the result!

However, I'm still not a fan of thread crochet.

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Woven heart inspired by Radmegan

Felt coaster inspired by Glaskar + Kunterbunt