A Woven Christmas Heart

Getting out the Christmas decorations yesterday made me remember these christmas hearts! And so of course I wanted to make some - one has to have a good pointed scissors to cut out these points. The weekly blip challenge is “pointed.”........

If you want to know more, there is a really good book “How my Mother Taught Me to Weave Christmas Hearts from the Museet Falsters Minder, with 150 different patterns by Knud Vagter. These paper woven hearts originally, with 2 pieces of shiny paper, are an old Scandinavian tradition, There is some thought that it was Hans Christian Andersen who produced the first woven heart in the 1860s but it doesn't have a handle, nor were they in his Christmas illustrations... The oldest in a museum in Denmark dates from 1873. The red and white is of course Denmark’s colors, but can be anything you like. They are like little baskets and would be filled with goodies and hung on the Christmas tree as decoration. It was a family activity that involved cutting them out and small fingers to weave the 2 pieces together (not so easy…) “Infrequent in the 19th century, it becomes more extensive in the early1900s and spreads with explosive force in the 1920s.” They have also been produced in Sweden as instructions have been found for a “woven heart basket” in 1883. Those had pleats on the opening, but it’s unclear how they came there…or to Norway....
Anyway, they are charming, look great as decoration, and are very fun to make !(requires some patience...)