Heart in Hand & Circuit Board Valentines

Despite being happily multicraftual, and owning a fancy cutting machine, and having a bunch of scrapbooking paper in my stash, I never make Valentines or other cards.  It just seems like such a big hassle for something that is so each to pick up at the store.

But, as part of my effort to be more thrifty, work through my stash, and try new things, I decided to try making a few Valentines with my Silhouette this year.  It might help that I only needed to make 3 for the Harry Potter Craftalong card exchange, since not many folks signed up this year.  I did a quick search on the Silhouette Store, and found a few card designs I liked.  So I spent about $2.20 on cutting files, and dug all the paper out of my stash. 

The hearts in hands were actually harder than they looked, and I made a mistake in my paper choices.  The hands are cardstock from the Happily Ever After line, while the red hearts are a printer weight paper.  You're supposed to weave the two layers back into one another, so there should be small red squares inside the tan squares in the center of the hearts. Unfortunately the two different weight papers didn't want to work together, so rather than mangling them, I gave up the second step of the weaving.  Instead I took the heart offcuts from the wrist band, and glued them into the spaces.  So three pretty cards for $.70 cents!

Then of course I had to make a card for my actual Valentine, my husband Jim.  He works as a programmer/software engineer, so I had to go with this adorable circuit board card I found.  When I found the piece of deep teal-green paper, I knew it had to be my circuit board.  (The example used red paper.  That would not do.  Circuit boards are NOT red!) The design also called for the little flash drive to be attached to the outside of the card, with a rivet or brad, and I didn't have any, plus I didn't really like how it looked.  And it had the circuit board as a cut out piece laid on top of a blank card base, which I didn't have a good color cardstock for.  So I played around with the file in the design software, and manipulated things until I was happy with them.

Plus it gave me something cute for the inside of the card.  I tucked it into Jim's Star Trek lunchbox for work yesterday, along with a peanut butter heart.  He found it when he sat down with all his coworkers.