Easy Homemade Valentine’s
Last year I saw the cutest idea for Valentine’s Day cards. Unfortunately, at the time, Bink was at a daycare with one other child and K was too old to pass out Valentines in school.
This year, mostly because of Pinterest, I started seeing ideas for Valentine’s Day way earlier than I would have ever thought of them in the past. And while there are lots of cute holiday arts and crafts activities that I want to try, I just had to make these cards.
Getting Bink to cooperate with that idea was harder than it needed to be. It involved me getting all of the camera settings ready, Hubby wrangling Bink, eventually having to get Bink a lollipop to cooperate, and taking 25 shots to get one decent one. And it still ended up like this:
I’d been hoping to get Bink with just the white door as the background. However, no matter how long we tried, I just couldn’t get that shot. Instead, I decided to erase the background in Photoshop and replace it with something less boring than the corner of our living room.
For the record, the smarter thing to do would have been to just get the background right in the first place. Or wait until I could go outside and have a pretty natural background. Or be less picky about the background. Instead, I spent about a half hour removing the background (and lollipop) with the eraser tool in Photoshop, then adding a chevron pattern background that I found on Pinterest. All in all, not as hard as it sounds, but more work than it should have been.
I took the picture above and made another Photoshop file with a border so I could add text. The font is a free one called Marquee.
This part could be done in almost any software or using a free online editor like Picnik, or you could just print the picture and do some lettering by hand.
I had planned on uploading this to a photo site that was offering 24 free Valentines, but when I did that shipping was $9. It seemed silly to spend $9 for my homemade Valentines, although I could have had them printed as actual 4×6 photo prints and they would have only cost about 20 cents each.
Instead I loaded up our printer with card stock, sized them to be 3×5 size (which seemed about right compared to the tiny classroom-style Valentines on sale everywhere) and printed a few sheets. Four of the Valentine’s fit on one page of cardstock.
I used my paper cutter (yes, I own a paper cutter…I bought it when I was making wedding crafts five years ago for $10 and I use it way more than you’d think) to cute out the Valentines. Then I used the paper cutter blade to make small slits above and below Bink’s hand to slip the lollipop through. It would probably have been easier with an Exacto knife or something similar.
I didn’t have Valentine’s Day themed lollipops sitting around the house (are they even in stores yet?). Especially because I didn’t think I’d get the overwhelming urge at 6 pm on Wednesday night to make Bink’s Valentines. NOW. I’ll buy some in a few weeks, but for illustration purposes, here’s the final card with a plain old non-Valentine’s Day lollipop.
They turned out pretty cute (it helps that I’m a sucker for the photo subject) and they were super cheap to make.
Caitlin MidAtlantic
January 20th, 2012 @ 8:43 am
I’ve seen that version on Pinterest as well. Yours turned out super cute! I’m still deciding how I want to make… I mean, how Laura should make hers this year!
Caitlin MidAtlantic´s last [type] ..It’s BA-ACK!