Christmas Danish Heart templates

thingiverse

These are 3D printable templates for cutting (or drawing) the paper used to make Danish Hearts. There are 3, 4 & 5 strip templates and one wiggly one. Children love weaving them and the template allows you too cut lots of paper at once. (For more design's see Lene and Anna Schepper's wonderful blog http://papermatrix.wordpress.com/hearts/ ) Danish history says that Hans Christian Anderson (of Ugly Duckling fame) created the first ones... and the traditional Danish colours are red & white (for the national flag); sheet music paper looks attractive with red paper. The templates make it easy to cut, with a sharp knife, lots of sheets of paper at once; or to mark out with a pencil for cutting with scissors. You can also do your own designs - Rosie (who's 9) did the centre one in "DanishHearts2.jpg". I've included an OpenSCAD file to generate straight line Danish Hearts of any size and number of strips. Hopefully, new templates will follow... Instructions Print out a template - "DanishHeart3_A4x4.stl" is best to start with. On our Replicator and for ABS, the default accelerated printing settings were fine (10% infill, 1 shell, 80mm/s, 230°C). Brief Instructions 1) Fold a pile of A4 sheets longways; use the 70mm wide template to cut out the shape - the curved edge goes away from the fold. 2) Take two of the cut shapes, put them at 90° to each other. 3) Weave together following "Assembly.jpg" - always go through a loop and alternate the paper colour. 4) Add a handle and put on your Christmas tree. This website has nice clear photos showing the weaving:http://www.ebygomm.ourownlittleworld.org/crafts/danish-christmas-hearts/ Longer instructions - cutting the paper 1) Find some brightly coloured A4 paper in constrasting colours / patterns. 2) Take a pile of ~8 sheets of paper and align their edges by tapping on the table. 3) Fold the paper in half (lengthways if you're using the 4-in-row 70mm wide template; widthways for the 2-in-a-row 97mm one). 4) Put a staple in the top corner, away from the fold - this will help keep the paper together when cutting. 5) Place the paper on a cutting board and put the template on top - the curved edge should be furthest from the fold and the straight edge (opposite) on the fold. See photo "Template.jpg". 6) Pressing down on the template, carefully cut the slits and then around the outside. An X-acto knife works well. 7) Repeat for the remaing paper - it helps to put staples in the waste areas to keep the sheets together. Weaving the Danish Heart - see "Assembly.jpg" 1) Take two of the cut pieces of paper, keep them folded in half. 2) The rules for weaving are _a) Go through - paper always goes through a "loop" of folded paper (never behind or above). _b) Alternate colour - if a strip went through a "loop" last time, then now it forms a "loop" and goes around the next strip. 3) Hold the pieces of paper as shown in step 1 of "Assembly.jpg" and gradually weave together. 4) When you've finished a row (step 3 in "Assembly.jpg"), slide that strip down and carry on (step 4 in "Assembly.jpg") 5) When you've finished weaving, check that the Danish Heart will open like a pocket (step 6 in "Assembly.jpg") - if not, then check if you went under/over rather than through a loop. 6) Glue or staple on a handle and hang from the Christmas tree - filled with sweets. Note: For the wiggly template, you can get different patterns depending on which way up the two pairs of wiggles are. For more information about Danish Hearts and other designs, see:http://www.hjertertiljul.dk/en/skabeloner_en.html (lots of designs)http://haabet.dk/users/julehjerter/figure.html (the Polar bear)http://papermatrix.wordpress.com/links/ (links and history)http://www.julekurver.no/ (photos and history)