Cardmaking Tips For Last Minute Valentines Day Cards

With Valentine’s day looming, you’ll probably get requests for handmade Valentine’s

Day greeting card, especially at the last minute. Make sure you’re ready with your

‘Sweet Heart Day’ themed card making supplies and keep some card blanks at the

ready.

Obviously pink and red are important but I’ve seen alternative styles and colour

schemes being used as well and being very effective. The kraft card look is back in

fashion yet again, so using it to create that extra matted layer in the background can produce outstanding looking cards with little effort, especially for that minimalistic

look.

Let’s not forget that this festivity is not only for secret and no so secret lovers but

also there’s a trend recently of sending Valentine’s cards to friends as a reminder

that we appreciate their friendship and that we want them to know how much they

mean to us.

As you can see from the card featured in the picture above that you can be quite

liberal in your use of kits and sentiments to match what you want to convey to your

loved one, in this case a dear friend of mine.

I like to use themed and coordinated kits (in this case Red Velvet Artful Kit by Hot of

The Press) but you can make various type of handmade greeting cards with the

blank cards, lace, ribbons you have in your craft stash and give it a twist by using a

new element such as a cute stamped animal (owls, birds or even llama seem to be

on trend as of late).

You can combine also new colour schemes as long as you use a sentiment or hearts

shaped images so that people know that you’ve made a Valentine’s card. I’ve seen

Orange and Blue; Purple & Pink as well as Red & Black used for very contrasting

albeit vibrant greeting cards.

Don’t forget to use textures such as jute like textiles (known as burlap in the States)

or real lace, even running your cardstock through a corrugator tool will make your

Valentine cardmaking very interesting and out of the norm.

So enjoy your creative output and remember to use very good cardstock for your

base cards for that professional finish. Don’t over indulge with chocolate though, oh

who am I kidding...just go for it !

Fabrizio Martellucci or Fab as he is known to his fellow crafters is a paper facilitator and craftivist as well as being enamoured with paper crafting, card making with a bit of scrapbooking. He like also Artist Trading Cards (ATC) plus writing the occasional craft related articles. You can see more of his cardmaking articles on Hubpages here.

Follow Fab on Twitter @fabriziomartel