How to sew gifts for Valentine’s Day?
With Valentine’s Day just around the corner, we’re seeing more and more advertisements for cards covered in messages of love, bouquets of flowers and heart-shaped chocolates.
For a change from these traditional gifts, why not sew something by hand? It’s the certainty of having a personal and 100% unique object.
Here are a few ideas for quick and easy sewing for Valentine’s Day!
A fabric envelope
The most important thing for Valentine’s Day is to give a personal gift that comes from the heart. It’s traditional to give a card or letter on this day of the year, to your “Valentine”.
If you’d like to make your little note even more personal, you can sew a small fabric envelope for the person to keep and in which he or she can store all their precious memories. This little project is a great way to use up your fabric scraps, but you can also invest in cotton decorated with pink hearts if you want to play the Valentine’s Day card to the hilt!
In our video tutorial, we explain every step of this quick, beginner-friendly project.
A heart-shaped cushion
If you don’t know what to sew for your other half for Valentine’s Day, a decorated cushion might be a good idea: once offered, it makes a very pretty decoration on an armchair, sofa, chair…
It’s also very quick to sew, can be easily adapted to the desired size and requires very little material: fabric and stuffing (note that you can also use scraps of fabric or wool if you don’t have stuffing in your cupboards).
The Monde de Jo channel offers a step-by-step tutorial on how to make a heart cushion. You can use cotton, faux fur, fleece… depending on the effect you’re looking for.
If you’re more comfortable sewing a classic square cushion, you can also cut a heart from a contrasting fabric and sew it onto your main fabric using the appliqué technique.
And if you like embroidery, you can use a light fabric and add the first name of the person you love, or phrases or quotes that remind you of your relationship.
A patchwork of memories
If you’d like to make your Valentine a very personal gift, you can sew him or her a patchwork of “memories”. This involves taking old fabrics and sewing them together to make a small blanket or, if you don’t have much, a coaster, a small decoration… The idea is to pick up fabrics that recall important moments in your relationship (the shirt worn on the first date, a piece of your child’s clothing…) and put them together.
Of course, this only works if you’re in the habit of collecting and keeping mementos from the past. Don’t cut up one of your child’s favorite shirts or dresses!
A little pouch containing souvenirs
In the same spirit, we can imagine a small pouch containing a few precious mementos of your love: the ticket to the first cinema session we shared, a ticket to a concert you enjoyed together, photos…
Once again, you can sew the pouch either with scraps of fabric you have in your closet or with a fabric you’ve bought for the occasion, whether it’s Valentine’s Day-themed or not.
As with the cushions, you can embroider the fabric squares with your first names, initials or a quote you like.
If you’re new to embroidery, or have never tried it before, you can use stem stitch, which is very simple and suitable for beginners.
To sew a small, simple pouch, you can follow Janome’s free tutorial, which you can adapt to your desired size.
What about you? Are you planning to make a gift for Valentine’s Day? What hand-sewn gifts do you like to give your loved ones?
