Make a woven Danish heart pouch

This Valentine’s Day, make a woven Danish heart pouch as a gift for friends, or make one for yourself! These woven pouches are perfect for loose change or other small trinkets. Plus, look at how adorable they are! Add a small Cupid’s arrow for the finishing touch, and you’ve got a wonderful gift.

Read below to get the full tutorial and other Valentine’s Day project ideas!

Christmas in Denmark is symbolized with a heart. It’s quite common to spend the Christmas season making woven hearts out of paper and hang them everywhere–on a Christmas tree, on garlands, on postal stamps. They’re really sweet. Here in America, we don’t use the heart for Christmas, but as you know from all of my projects within the last week, Valentine’s Day. SO, I morphed the Danish Christmas heart into something a bit different–a leather pouch. Because I love making things practical in addition to cute.

DIY woven Danish heart pouch

Materials:

• leather scraps (you can get some from Amazon)
• small Velcro circles
• scissors
• heart template (download here)
• pen

Instructions:

1. Cut out the template and trace it onto your scrap of leather.
2. Cut out the leather.
3. Fold the leather strip in half and crease.
4. Weave together by starting with the first little strips on either color and placing it outside of the other.
5. Move onto the second strip and place it under.
6. Move to the last and bring it out again.
7. Now start with the next strip and repeat the process but do the opposite pattern of the first strip.
8. Repeat to the last strip and do the same pattern as the first strip.
9. Turn the finished heart into a pouch by placing the adhesive velcro circles onto the inside of the pouch on either side.

Donzo.

I had made a few hearts and then realized that I could use them at a Valentine exchange that I attended over the weekend. It’s such an easy gift to make! I figured I needed to do something a little extra to them so I added in an arrow to complete the package.

I made the arrow out of a bamboo skewer and black paper (see more instructions here).

photography by Trisha Zemp

More Valentine’s Day project ideas

We’ve got plenty more craft ideas for your Valentine’s Day preparations! If you have leftover leather scraps from your Danish heart pouch, you can create these little 3D leather heart pins. You can also create these shrinky dink Valentine’s pins. They’d be perfect gifts to place in your heart pouch! We also have a couple posts that compile Valentine’s Day project ideas, which you can view here and here. You’ll never run out of gift ideas!