Kids valentines

Between all the kids at the childcare where I work and all of my cousins' kids, I mail and hand out a lot of kids valentines each year. I don't always make all those valentines myself, but that's what I decided to do this year. Of course, that meant I needed a quick and simple, but still cute, card design that I could mass produce.

I thought animals would be a good theme since they aren't either too boyish or too girly. I worked on the cards yesterday afternoon and today after work and made a total of fifty kids valentines. That should be enough with a few left over (just in case I miscounted).

I decided to make 3" x 3" cards because A) they seem like a good kid size and B) you can get eight cards of that size from one piece of 12" x 12" card stock. I used textured card stock for the card bases in a variety of colors: Pixie Pink, Real Red, Chocolate Chip, More Mustard, Not Quite Navy, Ballet Blue and Bashful Blue.

For the images I used five different stamp sets: Punch Bunch, Very Punny, Animal Stories, Wild About You, and Turtle & Co. I stamped the images on Whisper White card stock and colored them if needed. The line images are stamped in Chocolate Chip, Basic Gray or Jet Black StazOn ink and colored with markers. The solid images are stamped in Basic Gray, More Mustard, Ballet Blue or Not Quite Navy.

I was going to leave it at that, but the cards looked a little too plain. So I added just a little bit of ribbon on each card. (Note: All the products I used for these cards were from Stampin' Up!^® except the ribbon.)

For most of the cards, I stamped the image of the thought bubble and heart (from the Turtle & Co. set) along with the animal. But there were a couple of images where that didn't quite work. So for those cards I punched a small heart from red card stock and glued it on the image. Inside each card is another 2-1/2" white circle stamped with the greeting "be my valentine."

That's about it. Definitely quick and easy, and it feels good to know that I already have them done!

Thanks for stopping by!