Conversation Heart Taggie Pillows

I think taggie blankets for babies are neat so I thought a fun craft idea for Valentine’s Day would be to make a conversation heart taggie pillow. I ended up making a few of them because I thought they turned out really cute and we have a few babies that are due pretty soon (near Valentine’s Day) in our family. You could always make these pillows without the tags as well for a cute decoration or gift.

Materials

– Felt for heart (your choice of color)

– Felt for letters (magenta or red)

– Various pieces of ribbon (your choice of patterns/textures)

– Yarn to match color of heart

– Needle for stitching yarn into felt

– Fiberfill

– Hot glue gun/hot glue

– Scissors

– Heart Outline Printable

Directions

1. Take the piece of felt you are going to use for your heart and cut it in half as shown below. The half-sheets of felt will be used to make two congruent heart shapes.

2. Print out the Heart Outline. Cut out the heart so you can use it as your stencil.

2. Trace the Heart Outline onto each of the half sheets of felt from Step 1. (I found it was easier to fold both the heart outline and the half-sheet of felt in half and trace half of the heart onto the felt along the fold line as shown below.)

3. Cut out the heart shape from each piece of felt. When you are finished you should have two congruent heart shapes which will form the main body of your conversation heart pillow.

4. Decide on the phrase you want written on your conversation heart. Then draw or trace the letters needed for your phrase onto either magenta or red felt. [HINT: Trace your letters backwards so the pencil/pen lines will be on the back.]. I typed my phrase using Microsoft Word and traced the letters. I used the font Arial Rounded MT Bold in font size 115 and found that worked nicely.

5. Hot glue your letters to the center of one of your two felt hearts. This will be the front of your pillow.

6. Pick out some ribbon that you would like to use for the tags on your pillow. I tried to find some ribbon with bright colors and interesting patters and textures that I thought would be attractive to a baby. I also used Valentine’s Day ribbon I found at Michaels. If you don’t want to buy a bunch of ribbon, check for ribbon on gift bags or bags from stores like Victoria’s Secret.

7. Decide how long you want your tags to be on your pillow and cut a strip of ribbon twice as long. Do this for all of your ribbon (you only need one strip for each). I had 8 tags on my heart pillow so I cut 8 strips of ribbon.

8. Hot glue the two ends of your ribbon together to create a loop as shown below. Each loop will be a tag that you stitch into your pillow.

9. Using a needle and yarn/thread of the same color as your felt heart, begin to stitch the two felt hearts together. After knotting the starting end of my yarn under a stitch, I hot glued the rest of the end to the inside of the pillow to keep the stitches from coming out later.

10. As you stitch the hearts together, stitch in your ribbon loops by placing the glued end in between the hearts and drawing your needle and thread through the ribbon so that it is attached to the pillow. You can space them apart evenly around the heart or be creative with their placement. I had three ribbon tags on each side of my pillow plus one ribbon tag on each side of the top of the pillow.

11. Before stitching your pillow all the way shut, make sure to stuff it with the fiberfill.

12. Once you have finished stitching around your pillow, tie off your yarn. You may choose to hot glue the end of the yarn to the inside of the pillow to help keep it hidden and in place.

13. After cutting your yarn, your conversation heart taggie pillow is complete and you can give it to a baby to enjoy! It may even be a good cat toy as well 🙂 Or… simply keep it for a cute Valentine’s Day decoration.