I've got paper hearts on a string

Amanda needed to decorate about a half an acre of her woodland picnic area wedding venue on the cheap. So she came up with the idea of making these paper hearts on a string.

I designed and made about twenty of these looped paper hearts, pretty much just a modification of those paper scandanavian stars everyone learns to make in middle school. I love them but they kind of take forever — measure, cut, staple, recut, loop, staple ad nauseum.

So here's how to make them…

What you need:

• Pretty paper/book pages. I used the pages of an old coffeetable book about hawaiian volcanos, so there's a nice variation in color between the lava shots, jungle shots, and black and white text pages.
• Ruler
• Boxcutter or exacto knife
• Pen
• Scissors
• Stapler
• Something to cut over so you don't wreck your table

Step One
Measure out your paper in 1.5" increments — you'll need seven strips for each heart — and cut as evenly as you can with the boxcutter. If it's not totally straight all the way down, not a huge deal (but do try!).

Step Two
Fold one strip neatly in half, and split the other six up into sets of three that you think would look nice together.

Step Three
Grab your folded piece, fold side UP. This is going to be your center, and the top bit become the loop you can hang the finished heart by, so you want to be sure it's turned the right way up.

Step Four
Line up all your pieces together (three on each side of the folded strip) and staple once horizontally at the bottom about an inch up (or a bit less like here).

Step Five
To make each loop separate from each other and look nested, flip open your paper wad at the center. The two strips closest to the folded piece should be trimmed about three inches, and moving out from there, the next gets trimmed about an inch. Leave the outside pieces alone!

Step Six
Now you should have a crazy paper sea anenome/fleur de lis type thingy held together at the bottom, like so.

Step Seven
Grab your inside strip on one side (the shortest one) and loop it over, tucking it in towards the center. It should snug down pretty nicely and bump into your staple Repeat with the other two, so you have half a loopy heart.

Step Eight
Staple through the loops AND the center strip to hold things in place.

Step Nine
Now repeat the tucking and stapling on the other side and TADA!

Step Ten
Slide the string through the center loop sticking up out of the heart and string them up to use as decor anywhere!

UPDATE!

Flickr user Mashtater submitted this shot to the Offbeat Flickr pool of her finished product and they look AWESOME!

The addition of the patterned paper really looks good. Brava!