Amanda, as well as being our Diocesan Treasurer, is a talented crochet expert, and shares her advice for making crochet hearts (one of the suggested activities as part of the RISE UP! campaign).
I decided to crochet some of the hearts for which there is a video tutorial and hang them on a "tree" with some of the quotes from the resource pack. This was one of the suggestions of what to do and it was to give branches an idea of something reasonably simple that they could make to place in church in November.
I've used a variety of Stylecraft Special DK yarn in different shades of purple from my "stash" (I'm an avid crocheter), then I printed out and hung up half a dozen of the quotes provided in the resource pack. I chose 3 quotes from current and former Secretary Generals of the UN and 3 Bible passages. I went scavenging through the offcuts in our garden from when Dik pruned the Rowan tree that grows in our front garden earlier in the year, found a suitable branch, placed it in a clean jam jar with my glass flower arranging beads around to keep it upright and hung the crochet hearts and quotes on it.
I printed out the heading and logos from the resources onto thin card and stood this up around the jam jar.
If you know how to crochet, even just a bit, the video by Sarah-Jayne Fragola of Bella Coco Crochet, the link for which is on the main MU website under Get Involved>Rise Up!, is pretty straight forward to follow. Do be aware that if you follow the link in the video description to the source pattern this is written in US terminology, so watch out or your heart will come out tiny and you'll be wondering what on earth a stitch called "sc" is (UK double crochet)! There are 3 sizes of heart in the written pattern. I mainly did the medium size but there is one small and a couple of large hearts on the tree as well.
You can also crochet two hearts the same, put a little bit of stuffing in the middle and sew them together for a more 3-D effect heart - the details for this are in the written pattern.
Please be aware that Sarah-Jayne at one point in the video says that she's going to do one more Double Treble than is necessary / she actually does, the correction is in the description, but if you follow along with the video exactly you won't go wrong.
UK version of the pattern to download