Craft: Heart-Shaped Vision Board for Self-Love Magic

Here's an easy crafting project you can do to invite joy, love and happy times into your life. You can do it if you're on your own this Valentine's Day, or just because you want to. It uses the idea of vision boarding to help you attract the things you want, and cheer you up by helping you focus on what makes you happy. The heart-shaped vision board for self-love magic is a more permanent talisman using those techniques. 

I made the one in the pictures using upcycled materials. I cut out a heart shape from corrugated cardboard from a box, then cut out two identical shapes in paper to cover the front and back. The front heart used red paper from an envelope a Christmas card came in (I keep all sorts of bits of coloured paper and card for crafting purposes). The back heart I cut from pretty gift-wrap I'd saved from a wedding anniversary present last year.

Then I looked through old magazines for pictures of things I love and wanted to attract more of in my life. Doing that, I quickly realised what I want most of all is a lovely holiday by the coast and also to go for country walks to see spring flowers and butterflies! I cut those images into small heart shapes, as well as a couple from the pretty gift wrap. I also punched tiny hearts from pink card that had once been some nice food packaging. I used a piece of wool leftover from a knitting project as the loop to hang it from.

If you're doing a standard vision board, you just glue cut-out pictures to a piece of paper and pin it to your wall where you will see it regularly. The heart shape self-love talisman is designed to be a bit more permanent, so I used decoupage techniques. I painted diluted PVA glue on all sides of the paper and cardboard to prime it. When that had dried, I used more PVA glue to stick all the pieces in place, making sure to put the ends of the wool at the top, under the backing paper. After leaving it to dry again, I used several coats of dilute PVA glue to varnish the heart. 

My finished heart is now hanging on the wall, to remind myself of happy things, and invite more of what I love into my life.

One of the questions posted on my Facebook page after I recently gave a talk on magic for the month of February was about suitable crafts for people who don't feel very creative. I would say vision boarding is perfect, because you don't need to have ideas before you start doing it. The whole point is that you look through magazines or brochures and respond to images you see. You don't have to only use those kinds of materials. You can use wrapping paper, like I did, you can use pictures from greeting cards, old calendars or diaries, images printed from the internet, even little trinkets that you have around the house. You can add words or draw symbols and shapes as well if you like. 

After you've created a vision board - or a Valentine's Day self-love heart talisman - you can spend some time meditating on it and visualising those things entering your life. You can find out more about other types of visualisation techniques in my book Pagan Portals - Guided Visualisations.