Tag: heart

Graphic Design

I {heart} You printable

Jessica Smith

Did you know you can search for “free _____ background” on Google images and download pre-created, fun backgrounds for your design projects? I’ve used this new tip a few times now, downloading a free brick background for the Occasional Symphony poster I designed and a gray chevron background for today’s printable. I’m sure you’ve seen the cute “I {heart} You” printables floating around Pinterest where the I, O and U are a different color from the rest of the alphabet… and the O is a heart (cause otherwise you’d be making a cute sign to tell someone you owe them something and that would be weird….). Well, it was too fun and too cute to not make a version of my own. So, with a free chevron pattern in my back pocket/ downloads folder, I set out to create my own.

For this printable, I used a heart that I created myself in Adobe Illustrator and the font Crystal Radio Kit. Isn’t it a fun, bubbly font? So cute.

I grabbed the gray chevron print from google and faded it down to about 30 percent so it wouldn’t completely overwhelm the letters. Then, I picked colors for my letters, and a fun pink for the three stand-out letters. To get everything into a square, I justified the text and played with the kerning between individual letters.

Download here: IheartU

Loveeeeee it. Need a copy of your own? Download it! Want to make one for yourself — do it! And then show me how cute it is 🙂

Craft Projects

Mason Jar Candle Holders

Jessica Smith

My friend Amanda made the hubby and me homemade jam for our housewarming party last month. We’ve devoured two of the three jams, so two mini mason jars have been floating around our kitchen for a while. Brian thinks the same jar keeps ending up in our dishwasher (which is hopefully getting fixed today after being broken for a week and a half *groans*), but then he realized we have two of them. So then he wanted to throw both away *gasp*. Crazy  husband, we can craft those!

So, that’s what I set out to do. I still have a ton of pages left from the dictionary I tore apart, so I decided to Mod Podge paper onto each jar and make them into candle holders. I combined several ideas I’d seen on Pinterest (cutting our a heart in the paper, covering vases with twine, Mod Podging ribbon) to make a cute set of tea light holders.

First, I cut out a strip of paper to wrap around my jars. Once it was cut to size, I folded it in half and cut a big heart out of the center.

Then, I slathered some Mod Podge on the jar and carefully placed the strip of paper on top of it. It was a little tricky to get it to lay flat, but after smoothing it out and moving it around a bit, it worked out.

I covered the whole jar again with Mod Podge, even the cutout portion of the heart. I chose to do this so the glass would have an etched effect. Plus, I bought battery operated tea lights from the dollar story so I didn’t want them to be so obviously fake.

I let this dry for a while, but not completely, before moving on to my next step. For the next part of my project, I cut out teal ribbon to strip the candle holder. To secure it to the jar, I simply painted a thicker layer of Mod Podge onto the spot I wanted the ribbon to stick. I smoothed the ribbon stripes out and let that dry, too.

To finish this project (and cover a few imperfections) I wrapped the bottom of the jars in twine and tied an accent piece of twine around the top of the jar. To secure the twine to the jar, I powered up my hot glue gun and placed little dabs of glue here and there. I wrapped the top with one single strand of twine, and the bottom with several layers of twine.

To top it off, I made a twine bow for each jar.

With one last dab of hot glue for the bow, my candle holders were left to dry overnight. The next day I placed a tea light in each one to see how they looked.

I think they turned out pretty darn cute. I’m not sure what the hubby will think when he finally notices them (he’s not a big fan of twine), but I think this was a fun way to reuse Amanda’s jam jars!

 

Did I mention Remmy stole a candle during my photo shoot? Darn dog…

Happy Tuesday!

Quick and Easy Crafts

Love note bookmarks

Jessica Smith

Today is our first wedding anniversary — I can’t believe it’s been a year already since we got married. My how time flies.

After spending a year married to my best friend, it was easy to come up with a lovey-dovey paper gift for our first anniversary.

In fact, I made him two paper gifts! The first was a digital scrapbook of our honeymoon to St. Lucia. It turned out great and I know he is going to love it.

Then, I bought him a set of four computer programming books he really wanted (so boring, but he’s gonna be so pumped!). So, to go along with his book, I made him a set of love note bookmarks.

I’m sure you’ve all seen the paint chip bookmarks trending on Pinterest — I decided to do a take on that and play off the fact that we just bought our first home in our first year of marriage — so what better than paint chip/love note bookmarks?!

I stopped by Home Depot to grab a bunch of paint swatches, but they don’t really carry any of the “typical” paint swatches (vertical with multiple squares of color per bar). So instead I grabbed a variety of colors of Behr swatches to cut down to the perfect bookmark size.

First, I had to cut these over-sized swatches down to appropriate bookmark size. Behr has this cool feature on its premium paint colors — a punch out in the bottom left corner to hook all of your swatches together. This was the section I cut off.

I then rounded the freshly cut corners using a scrapbook tool (thanks, Mom!).

Once the corners were rounded, it was time to cutesy up my bookmarks… but not too much. I want Brian to use them, after all.

I borrow a heart punch from my Mom to make these bookmarks a little bit more lovey. I chose the smallest heart option she had so as not to make them too girly.

I finished making a bunch of bookmarks and got to jotting down cute notes.

I used a sharpie so my messages would show up nice and clear. I think they turned out great. Hopefully the hubbs likes them!

Happy anniversary to the most wonderful husband a girl could ask for. You’re the best, babe. I love you to pieces and am so happy to spend forever with you. You are my No. 1 Husband, fo sho.

❤ Your wife of the year

Happy Monday, and have fun making your own paint chip bookmarks. So easy, so cute.