I'm really not into Valentine's day. Despite being in a long term relationship, every year it comes around and it just annoys me (sorry!). Perhaps it's the pressure it places on couples to make extravagant (and often expensive!) gestures or the unnecessary reminder to singletons that they are, in fact, single. Either way, my boyfriend and I rarely celebrate it; last year, as a good will gesture to the day I bought him a steak and he bought me some chocolate. But in fact, that isn't really that unusual for us, and buying lavish gifts for a day that as far as I'm aware has become popular because of card companies, isn't really my cup of tea.

Despite that though, I love love and adore small, thoughtful gestures. My flat is already full of heart shaped dangly things but as it is supposedly (there's that scepticism) the season of all things heart shaped, I though I would make another one. I'm not usually much of a seamstress but after finding some felt I thought I'd temporarily leave my clay-ey comfort zone and have a go at sewing it by hand.

1. Cut out equal sized hearts from each sheet of felt and a slightly smaller heart from the wadding. To do this I traced around the heart cutout using a biro and cut out with scissors. I'd recommend cutting off the pen line at this stage as if you look closely in my photos you can still see the biro!

2. Place the smaller heart shaped wadding in between the two heart shaped pieces of felt. Using pins, I fixed the two pieces of felt together with the wadding in between to make it easier to sew them together.

3. Thread your needle with one a length of wool in one colour and sew up from the apex of the heart to the top. In the end of the wool I tied a knot and starting from the tip of the heart, sewed up to just before the top middle of the heart.

4. Knot three different coloured lengths of wool together and plait. Here I cut three lengths of wool, each a different colour and tied a knot at one end so that they were fixed together. To make plaiting easier, I pushed a safety pin through the knot and attached the pin to the arm of my sofa (lol). Once I'd finished plaiting, I tied a knot in the end and cut off any excess.

5. Tie each end of the plait together to create a loop. Removing the plait from the safety pin, tie the ends together to create a loop for the heart to hang on.

6. Push the end into the still open top middle of the heart. At this point, if you feel your loop is too long, you can make it shorter by pushing it in further.

7. Continue sewing around making sure you sew the loop in place. Holding the loop in place by squeezing the top of the heart together, continue sewing the heart up. Here, I pushed the needle and thread through the plaited loop a couple of times to keep it firmly in place.

8. Tie off, cut the wool and hang. Continue all the way round to the bottom, tie off and cut the wool.This took me no longer than a couple of hours in total to make, which probably would have been much shorter if I hadn't had to continually dodge cats pouncing on me and my wool.