Do you make or buy your cards for Valentines?
If you have never made them before, it’s so easy!
We do them every year because: 1. I have lots of materials, and 2. It’s fun to do something I love with girls.
We make it age appropriate by making it simple. We cut out some hearts on cardstock and attach a little goodie on it. The girls will write their classmates’ names and their own names and that’s it! Super simple and it allows them to practice their writing and promotes them to think of others.
PLUS it was super fun to do it together. ❤
Now that they’re older (and K doesn’t even hand out cards in middle school anymore!), I decided to step it up a notch by using the Cricut.
Liv loves creating and though I sketched out a card initially, she added her own touch to it. It prompted us to use the DRAW tool for the first time too, which was fun to watch it action!
There’s also a FLASH Valentines Day sale going on right now – 40% off materials (the cardstock is an amazing deal)! I have linked some of the products I used. Some are affiliate links that don’t cost you extra if you choose to purchase. I am grateful for your support.
So how did we do make these cards? Here’s the low down:
MATERIALS
- Cricut Explore Air 2 or Maker
- Cricut pen, black, fine point
- Cardstock: pastel, glitter, assorted
- scissors
- sticky mat
- weeder
Materials are also available on my Amazon Store:
- Pastel cardstock
- Glue Stick, 3 pack
- Cricut pens
- weeder
Open up Design Space. Use the SHAPE tool and create your heart.
Create 2 more hearts and keep them small.
Add them to the larger heart for the “eyes”.
Using the TEXT tool, write who it is from.
Adjust the CURVE to your liking for the “smile”.
You can pretty much stop here but Liv wanted to add her poem so we used the TEXT tool again for this.
Adjust the size and drag onto the larger heart.
The key here is to tell Cricut we want these words to be DRAWN on not CUT out. We switched the option to DRAW on the upper left side. To find out if it worked, you can look on the right column. Beside the text layer, it should say DRAW and not CUT.
Next, select all the layers and click ATTACH. If you don’t attach it, it will all cut/draw each layer separately. Now you can adjust the sizing. We made ours 4″ wide.
We were using 8.5 x 11″ size paper and wanted to maximize the number of cards we could get from one sheet of cardstock. Cricut automatically fit in 4 on a sheet but I noticed that if I shifted the hearts closer together, I was able to fit 6. So I DUPLICATED it 6x.
When it is all cut and drawn out, remove from mat and attach next sheet of cardstock. Liv liked using the weeding tool to remove the cards.
After they have all been cut, Liv picked a contrasting colour and attached it to the mat. This is for the backing of the cut out hearts.
Using the same steps as above, we created 6 hearts the exact same size as the cut hearts and let the Cricut do its job.
Then we glued the two hearts together.
By the end of this project, Liv was able to tell Cricut to cut on Design Space, place cardstock onto the mat, load it into the Cricut, unload the mat and weed. She learned so much from one project!
We had such a fun time working together and using our creativity. I think there will be many Cricut projects with this girl in my future. 🙂
Do you and your kiddos create projects together?
Nourish Through Movement 