Saturday, February 11, 2012

Quick and easy homemade Valentines

I've been trying to decide what to do for Valentine's Day cards.  I didn't want to spend a lot of time, but I kind of wanted to make some homemade cards with the kids.  I tried finding some ideas on Pinterest, but everything I saw was pretty complicated, and I really didn't want to invest a lot of time or money.  So I came up with a simple, fast, and inexpensive (I spent $0) card for us to make.


Step 1: I pulled out my Cricut and found a nice fat heart shape on my Tie the Knot cartridge.  Then I cut out (using the "real size" setting) three 3" hearts and three 2.5" hearts out of each 6"x12" piece of paper (I cut out 48 of each in all).  If you don't have a Cricut, you can just cut out the number of hearts you need by hand.
Step 2: I folded down the very top of the 2.5" hearts, using my bone folder (aka creasing tool) to help make the fold cleaner.











Step 3: I printed out some simple phrases to match the paper ("I'm wild about you" to go with the animal print and "I think you're SUPER" to go with the super hero themed print) with each of the children's names.  Then I used one of the 2.5" hearts as a template and cut these phrases out (if you line them up right, you can cut out a few hearts at once).  Then, I glued the 2.5" phrases hearts centered on top of the 3" heart.

Step 4: Then I glued just the top folded portion of the original 2.5" hearts on top (making sure that it lined up on top of the phrases heart).











Step 5: After the top heart dried, the flap was sticking up, so I got out the heaviest book I own, The Complete Shakespeare anthology, and put it on top of the cards to press down the flap.  I left this over night, but 15 minutes would probably be fine.









Step 6: The final product: 42 homemade Valentine's cards.


The whole project took me about an hour and a half including conception of design (of course not counting the overnight squishing down of the flap), and I made it using all materials I had on hand!

I did leave a few undone, so that the boys can help me put a few together this morning, because I want them to feel like they helped make their classmates' Valentine's cards.

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