Heart chain garland
Instruction
Celebrate Valentine's Day (or a general love of hearts) with this heart chain garland.
File contains 25 hearts and links to put together into a 4' 10" chain, but you can make any length.
Choose a material that can flex without breaking. Assembly of the chain requires twisting the heart slightly to allow the links to pass through.
The interior dimension of the links is 8mm, enough to accommodate a material thickness of 3mm or 4mm with some room to move.
3mm basswood plywood works well. It is strong enough and has plenty of flex, but be aware that lower-quality plywood may split if there are bad spots in the material.
[This happened with one of the 25 hearts in this project. Broke my heart, literally 😂 With a little glue it was good as new, but cutting additional hearts as insurance would work too.]
Adjust the settings appropriate to your machine and material and cut. All objects in the file are set to cut, but there are two layers, so the machine should drop the links before it drops the hearts.
Want a longer chain? Load up some more material and rerun the file. A 12"x12" panel will produce 25 hearts and links, which should result in an approx. 4' 10" chain. [Not sure how many it would take to circumnavigate the globe, but I'm betting it's a lot.]
Bundle up all of your hearts and links and begin assembly. If you're doing just one set, you'll have 25 hearts and 25 links. If you're doing more, you'll have… more. 😁
- At the bottom of each heart is a slit. Push one side upwards and the other downwards (sort of like twisting it apart--do this gently, you don't need much room) and slip a link through the gap.
- Take another heart and join it to the previous link in the same way.
- Repeat until there are no hearts left.
You will always have one link left over at the end. (The extra one lets you join multiple sets together.)
If you are making really long chains, put them together in shorter lengths and then join them as you hang them. You will thank yourself later.
Pins, nails, hooks, string, they all work fine. Hang one lobe of the first heart on the pin, then swag the chain across to the next, and so on. The middle hearts will hang sideways on one lobe.
Since your chain is made of square links, it can hitch up after being jumbled together. Just gently and patiently rearrange the links to get them straightened out.
That's it. Happy Valentine's Day! ❤️