craftgrrl | happy anniversary, happy anniversary! (Reply)

for my sweetie and i's one year anniversary/officially common-law (yeah, i know, it's not usually at the same time, but...) i made him a set of playing cards that tell him the reasons i love him. sappy i know. it's a full deck, complete with the joker, a picture of him. here's a few of the cards.

they ended up being more labour intensive than i'd imagined, but i'm so happy with them!

how i'd do it? good question!
i started out writing the list of the reasons i love him.

then i traced a playing card a million (kay, i'm exagerating.) onto the blue paper with a marker. then i made a template out of a post-it-note of the centre rectangle and went through magazines cutting around it to make all the centres the same size. they're all just neat textures and patterns i found in ads and stuff. then i glued them onto the blue cards and used markers to draw on the number and suite. then i wrote each reason on a little slip of paper and glued them on.

onto kinkos!
i spent forever at kinkos. i colour photocopied the sheets of blue paper and i photocopied the backing of the card. (it didn't scan very well though, so i didn't post it) for the backing i found fun fabric in light blue with little navy blue cowboys all over it. then i glued them together and cut all the cards out.

(i copied the cards because i was worried about the little slips falling of when i laminated them.)

then i gave them to kinkos to laminate them and when i got them back, i cut them all out again

i figure it took me about 9-12 hours total. i spent a lot of time at kinkos!

between the photocopying, the fabric and the laminating they cost about $25 i think.

it would have been cheaper not to laminate them, but i wanted to be able to actually play cards with them, shuffle etc.

they worked great! i'm so happy with them and he loves them. but now i've got his birthday and christmas coming up and i'm screwed!

BTW, i'm kinda newish, but i didn't have a way to get pictures onto the computer, so i've never posted, just commented obsessively. i just got a scanner, so this is my first actual post. when i get a digital camera, i'm sure you'll see more of me!

crossposted to