I love a homemade Valentine card to send via snail mail. Finally, a batch was completed and mailed out- hoping they get to their intended recipients by this Valentines Day! This year I went into batch mode to make simple and sweet Valentines with items I already had. Batch mode may not seem very artistic, but it helps move projects from start to finish when time is limited.
Maybe you want to make your own sweet cards for sweet friends, family or the special someone? This project doesn't take much time or even effort. It just takes heart ( sorry for the pun, I couldn't help it!)
What You Need
- blank notecards
- hodge podge
- words cut out from magazines
- hearts- cut out from scrapbook paper or magazines
I already had blank note cards. I cut out words from old magazines, cut hearts out of the color of pages I liked from the same magazines (and from leftover craft paper I have) and grabbed my hodge podge. I purposely made my hearts odd shaped and spunky because love and relationships are odd and spunky and wonderful and spontaneous.
Are you ready? Let's go!
The hodge podge needs to be applied on the back and front of the paper. For this project, I smeared a thin layer of hodge podge on the card, stuck my heart on and applied more hodge podge over it. Too much hodge podge will do weird things to magazine paper, so go light!
I started by cutting everything first and then hodge-podging it on. The hearts I cut at the same time. Then I looked for Valentine themed words in magazines. Finally I started assembling everything together. I'm the farthest thing from a perfectionist; I love making something free and fun and a bit unpredictable.
For fun flourishes.
My friend Krislyn, a fellow craft conspirator, taught me this. If you've done stamping, you already know this but I was head-over-heels in love with this simple method of creating a border. Take the edge of the ink pad and gently press it around the edges of the card.
I like messy and I didn't necessarily want a heavy outline. The card originally looked a tad bare, like it needed to be "grounded" a bit. I wanted to create an edge to make the hearts pop and this rusty gold edge did that for me.
Another fun flourish is dots. Deb N. from a class I took with Junelle Jacobson came up with this way of dotting- she grabbed a sheet or dry wall. This was another astonishing revelation to me and a testimony to the joy of doing classes with other people. We learn so much from each other! I like to use my fingers with the dots and again, I'm far from a perfectionist. My dots are often messy and squiggly.
Happy Valentines Day!
The post Ten Minute Tutorial: Handmade Valentines Day Cards appeared first on Launch Your Creative Life.