Hang Positive Vibes around your home!

Today I want to share a quick and simple make using an mdf hanging heart decoration. I love making these as gifts or interchangeable little pieces of home decor around the house. Our new Positive Vibes collection is a great starting point as the monochrome papers and happy images can be adapted to work with any colour scheme. I like the idea of hanging a little reminder to be positive in my craft room as it fits well with my word of the year - Nurture. This is what I made:

I was inspired by the prompts from our January Take 3 challenge - purple, love and stitching! Let me show you how I put this little project together.

First I painted the mdf heart with gesso. You can skip this step if you are going to decorate your heart with papers. The gesso simply prepares the mdf surface for acrylic paint and acts as a barrier so that the paint doesn't sink straight in to the wood. It also helps when you are using light colours as it creates a white base to paint over.

Once the gesso was dry, I painted the heart with this soft lilac colour from Paper Artsy. Their paints have a chalky finish which works well for mdf projects.

Once the paint was dry, I used a white pen to draw some faux stitching around the edge of the heart.

I covered the hand drawn stitching with masking tape before stamping and white heat embossing our new Brushstroke Hearts stamp. I wanted the stamping to be contained within the doodled border. I recommend adding the embossing powder before you take away the masking tape or it will stick to any residual stickiness that the tape has left on the surface of the mdf.

The imperfect, brushstroke style of the hearts are very forgiving for this type of project as it isn't obvious if the stamping isn't perfect!

I then stamped one of the images from our new Positive Vibes stamp set with Versafine Onyx Black ink. I coloured it in with Derwent Inktense pencils which can be activated with water. I didn't use watercolour cardstock on this occasion as I was only using minimal moisture to blend the colours.

I stuck my character where I wanted her and trimmed off the excess of the image.

I chose a design from our new Monodoodles paper pad and drew around the heart. Cut the paper and adhere to the heart. You can use fine sandpaper around the edge to get a neat finish.

I wanted to add the sentiment from the stamp set to the back of the heart so I blended some Shaded Lilac ink on to a piece of white cardstock and stamped the sentiment in black.

Adding a bit of ink around the edge ties it together and softens any uneven edges too! I used some embroidery floss to create the loop for the heart to hang from.

As you can see - it is a simple make and would be perfect accompanied with a card featuring the same design! I only needed to paint and prep one side of the heart as I was using paper on the back but didn't think of that at the time :)

You can find our Positive Vibes collection here and our MDF Hanging Hearts here.

I hope that you like this make and that it encourages you to take your stamps off the page and on to some simple home decor!