AKA HEARTS OF WOOD. We’ve got­ten a lot of great com­pli­ments on our wed­ding details via the Style Me Pretty fea­ture, and quite a few peo­ple loved the hearts we made to stand on dur­ing the cer­e­mony so we wouldn’t be wob­bling around on the grass in our heels – since height was sort of a require­ment for my maids + matrons. Here’s a quick how-to on mak­ing “heart step­ping stones” of your own. We needed to have 7 smaller hearts and one large heart – this guide will yield that amount with some scrap wood left­over. It cost around $100 total, my dad had all the tools and he bought the ply­wood which I think was about $50, and the paint and brushes were about $50 also.

You’ll need:

  • two 4 x 8′ sheets of ply­wood (I think we used an untreated version)
  • tape mea­sure and pencil
  • jig saw
  • sander
  • two sawhorses
  • 1 gal­lon of paint, plus a cou­ple rollers and brushes– we used a High Gloss Enamel in Blush­ing Piglet. It’s a Dis­ney color. The best pinks are Disney.

First, get a round of beers for any­one help­ing you. Put a sheet of ply­wood on top of the sawhorses. Next, draw a heart that’s about 2.7′ width x 2′ height in the top left cor­ner (@ first we pro­por­tioned out 6 squares on the first plank, which would’ve yielded 2 x 2′ hearts but decided we could make them a lit­tle bit wider for bet­ter sta­bil­ity). If you are pleased with the first heart’s shape, cut it out by slowly fol­low­ing the out­line of the heart with the jig saw. If you need to you can sand the edges of your first heart to make it per­fect – once it is, place it on top of the board and trace its’ out­line four times. Repeat by cut­ting out the remain­ing hearts. We made the large heart out of 2/3 of the sec­ond sheet of ply­wood which left room for 2 smaller hearts.

Once all hearts had been cut and sanded we started to paint them, we prob­a­bly put 2 – 4 coats on each heart, some of them had those inked mark­ings that had to be coated mul­ti­ple times to cover. We let them dry in the sun a cou­ple hours.

If you do this project I’d love to see your results/interpretations. I orig­i­nally wanted to paint my girls’ names on the hearts but fig­ured it would look bet­ter plain since they’d be stand­ing on them.


Steven cut­ting the hearts with the jig saw. When he was fin­ished cut­ting I’d start sand­ing the edges to make them more round. With my dad help­ing it only took about 3 hours on two Sun­days in a row.

Let me know if you have any ques­tions, I’m happy to help.