I admit that I'm not actually the type to hang a heart sculpture on the wall but I figured there would be someone I knew - likely of the female persuasion - that was certain to be. And I did like the general concept; the ribbon of contrasting wood, the finely-laminated look and the not-very-symmetrical shape appealed to me so it seemed like a worthwhile endeavour. I'll note that I've made a couple things with a similar wood construction in the past like this and this.

I happened to have suitably-sized pieces lying around of both a thickish Baltic birch plywood and a contrasting solid wood - in this case purpleheart.

The heart could theoretically have been made from a single piece of wood but it would have been pretty tough to form the sharp dip at the top. That feature would be much cleaner if two separate pieces were used, so I went with that approach. Ok, and yes, it also let me also use the wood I had on hand, which was a bonus.

I started by tracing the contours from the plan onto the plywood. Due to my shameful laziness in doing the drawing, those contours actually consisted only of the center lines of the top and bottom edges, so as seen here I manually drew in a wider profile to guide the cut. There are two copies of each side since the construction needed two layers of plywood.

Also for each side I wanted the two pieces to be 90° to each other. This maintained the alternating grain orientation when the two pieces of plywood were stacked - hence the odd positioning on the board.

I used my baby band saw (an 8" model) to cut out the shapes since it was equipped with a narrow blade suitable for cutting curves - that was easier than changing to a thinner blade in my large 14" saw.

Two sets of crudely-cut-out half-hearts.

The plan was to have a plywood core flanked with the contrasting purpleheart. To that end I chopped the almost-2" piece into four thinner slices with the first cut being in progress here.

The wider blade I had on the 14" band saw was easily capable of cutting straight through the six inches of hardwood like I'm doing here but it can cut only large-diameter curves.

The two plywood pieces were laminated with one of the purpleheart sides. Here the 3-piece stackup for each side has been glued and thoroughly clamped.

My last woodworking endeavour (small turned Christmas trees) still lurks over on the right-hand side since I hadn't quite gotten around to storing them away until a more-appropriate season.

Once the glue was dry, the excess purpleheart was trimmed off flush(ish) with the plywood.

After gluing and trimming the second side in the same manner, the two half-hearts were ready for some shaping.

Yes, it looks like they were actually cut out with a hatchet but all the crude bits are soon to be sanded into oblivion (or at least my dust collector bin).

The centerlines were traced on again to guide the shaping.

I once again pencilled on some lines that took into account the thickness of the finished ribbon of wood and then proceeded to sand down to those lines.

The inside curves were done using the spindle sander as seen here (equipped with an 80-grit drum) while the outside curves were smoothed using the belt sander.

The ribbon of wood forming the walls of the heart are twisted up to about 10° through their length. That's why in this shot the outside is being sanded at a noticeable tilt.

In a relatively short time (Yay power tools!) the first stage of sanding was done; the walls are a consistent width of about 1/4" and have the appropriate twists along their length.

The plan was to give the wood a tapered profile. I'd start that by sanding a bevel in the outside edges and then round things off.

To help guide the bevel sanding I used a wooden guide to draw lines up to where the bevel should reach.

Like the initial shaping, the edge bevels were added using the spindle and belt sanders for the inside and outside curves respectively.

I'm wearing a dust mask in this shot as I did for all the sanding. My 500 CFM dust collection system didn't seem to do a good enough job of preventing air-borne dust so I opted for a bit more protection.

Once all the edges were bevelled, the profile was rounded off.

And then each half was touched up by hand with 220 and then 320 grit to eliminate any scratches from the machine sanding.

Finally the two halves could be joined into the heart shape. The connecting edges had previously been sanded to fit together so it was a matter of arranging tape and clamping jigs to hold the oddly-shaped parts together while the glue dried.

In this shot I'm applying glue from the droplet on the right to both of the joints with the small spatula.

The bottom joint had been taped to hold it together and the top joint got both a mini-clamp and some supplemental tape.

Once the glue was dry, the two joints were cleaned up using the spindle sander.

And then a final bit of hand-sanding.

All the dusty work done.

As I like to say: "It isn't finished until it's finished". So then I finished it.

This is the first coat of polyurethane varnish going on.

The plywood became a bit less blonde with the finish in place. In this photo, the first coat is still wet.

I'll go on to apply a total of three coats of varnish with a good rubbing of fine steel wool between coats.

Done.

The twist to the walls of the heart is a bit more evident when seen in person. It mostly looks like effects of perspective in this from-the-top photo.

One more angle.

I'll usually do a "rotation" gif image to show the item details and this usually involves a basic turntable with a suitably-sized cylinder of wood as a plinth.

That arrangement wasn't going to work in this case so I kludged together this setup to rotate the heart. The structure consists of some turning blanks (mahogany and walnut, as if that matters) bridged by a chunk of 2x4 supporting a short stretcher piece from which the heart is suspended using black thread. The stretcher swivels on a bolt through the 2x4 and is equipped with a 32-point scale to help achieve an even rotation between successive photos.

The procedure is to position the camera on a tripod, take a photo of the heart, rotate it 1/32 of a turn, take another photo, etc.

This is one of the 32 shots taken with that setup. The framing leaves a fair amount of space around the item to make sure that no corner of it rotates out of frame as it goes through the full 360° (yes, learned through bitter experience).

Then a bit of cropping, some colour/exposure correction and finally some black thread erasure using a cloning function as shown here gets it to a finished image.

This is the finished image I was working on in the last photo.

I just did that 31 more times and then used a program to combine and resize the images into an appropriately-sized gif image that steps through all the images.