How I made Heart Shaped Bird feeders for Valentines

What better way to show some love for nature on Valentine's day than with heart-shaped bird feeders.

Last year wrote how I'd made bird feeder teacups.  With the leftover lard and seed, I decided it would be nice to make some heart-shaped feeders to complement Valentine's day.

I am yet to master this!  I think it is fair to say I won't be making these again any time soon, well, not until I master the cutting out.

As with the teacups, I used lard, birdseed and heart-shaped cutters.  I think these may have started life as cookie cutters.  I'm now wondering if metal cutters would work better?

I placed a baking sheet on a tray and then added each of the heart-shaped cutters.  This, I believe, would help with getting the hearts off the sheet once set in the fridge.

I spooned the melted lard and seed mix into each of the hearts, in hindsight, I should have left the two smallest hearts alone!  I placed a paper straw in each heart to create a hole big enough to hang tweed/string once the hearts were set.

This is a messy greasy craft.  

You have been warned.

I left the hearts in the fridge for two days, not deliberately, I got sidetracked with other projects and forgot about them!

Once out of the fridge the hard part was gently getting these hearts out of their holders AND keeping their shape.  As you can see from the photo above some of the lard had oozed out of the bottom of the cutters. 

I ran a knife around the edge of the shapes and gently pushed the heart out the bottom.  This seemed to work well for the three bigger shapes.  We don't talk about the two small ones.

I think they've turned out OK.  You can quite clearly see the shape is a heart so for me, that's mission accomplished.

I've put them in the trees and they actually look quite eye-catching against the greenery, and now I see them, I may just try some more!

If anyone has any tips on how to ease these hearts out of the cutters without them losing shape or getting mashed I'd love to hear them.