Paper Envelopes - Danish Woven Heart

This heart can be purely decorative, or you can take advantage of the open top to make it into a (fragile) basket. You can also make it out of felt or other flexible but sturdy fabric.

Instructions

Here are a few links that show you how to make these hearts. Also a few tips I learned from making my example.

The proportion for the two lozenge-shaped pieces is 1:3 - mine were 3” x 9” to work with standard #9, #10, or 6x9” envelopes.

Fold the lozenges in half and cut the slits carefully (you can do as few as 3 and as many as you want as long as they are symmetrical - see templates), making sure that they are a little bit longer than the width of the lozenge (so ~3 1/8” if your width is 3”) to have a little wiggle room to weave the strips into place.

Work one strip at a time from the strip nearest the top of heart to the one along the bottom (see tutorial video) - the key is that each strip has a front and a back and is effectively a loop, so you weave the strips around entire strip of the other side and then through the middle of the next double strip - weaving the front and back simultaneously.

In order to get more complicated patterns to fit more easily, you can complete one strip and then start the next ones sequentially so that you slowly ease each strip along next to its neighbors to fit together snuggly at the end (see my example below in image 3). A three-strip pattern can be fairly easy - more complex patterns can be VERY frustrating!

Basic templates

https://www.origami-resource-center.com/more-patterns.html https://www.firstpalette.com/printable/heart-basket.html

Fancy template

http://theiff.org/current/events/danish-heart-improbable-paper-topology-workshop/

Video Tutorial (helpful for weaving!)

https://youtu.be/7iQReH4pWvc/