Sew while he sleeps: I Heart February post- a preview of my first tutorial!

I could not resist making a Valentine's Day related project, especially after I spied a fun linky and contest over at Pink Chalk Studio's blog, and a contest for a tutorial over at Sew Mama Sew. So I whipped up this heart hanging. I hope I will get my first tutorial written for it later this week. Edited to add: here is the link for the tutorial!

First off, I have been doing some reading on Zen and also on architecture- I know, bear with me. The book was called The Architecture of Happiness by Alain de Botton. In the very last bit, he writes about the Japanese concept of beauty and transience called wabi-sabi. (With apologies to any Japanese readers or scholars- I will misconstrue this, but only to the best of my abilities and intentions). The idea is that our ideas of beauty lie largely in perfection, while wabi-sabi is more about appreciating the beauty in asymmetry, organic, irregular objects or activities. Thus, the idea for this project was born and executed.

The whole aesthetic of this project is to embrace the raw, rough parts of fabric and sewing and take a break from the measured, perfect angles that quilting often takes. For me, it is a psychological break from my usual sewing room thinking.

It is a lot of sketchy sewing without much regard to linearity or spacing, though it is hard not to think of those things after sewing so long.

I laid down the strips with raw edges and sewed two lines down each pieced strip to secure them down. Then I reverse appliqued the heart shape on natural muslin.