Valentines Day │ 5 Things We Love About You

A notice came via email a week ago from my daughter's teacher asking all of the parents to write a love note to their child that would be read aloud this week at school. I of course thought this idea was amazing and sweet and totally right up my alley. She stated in the instructions that she was hoping for messages of accomplishment, encouragement of personal goals, memories and expressions of paternal love (x2 for us). That added up to five things in all so my wheels started turning on how I could accomplish this. I could have easily sat down with pen and paper and written it in letter form but she also said that we could feel free to get creative and add photos, artwork, stickers, etc. I need no extra incentive to make something more that it needs to be so when she said we could use photos I thought a little micro mini was the perfect idea.

My inspiration came from the numbered tags that Ali Edwards had included in her December Daily® kit this past year. I used one of them in my album as you can see here so I initially thought I would use the one thru five tags since I had only used the number fourteen.

I thought it would be really cute to add some red and pink foil to them using my Minc Machine and since I wasn't sure how these tags were printed I decided to make my own.

The first thing I had to do was create the tag shape. I used a tag I had already purchased as my starting point and then adjusted the size to what I wanted it to be. I knew I wanted to Minc the number and the little circle around the tag hole so I created my documents knowing I would use the Print and Cut feature. I have a laser printer so making custom items to Minc is super easy.

One thing you have to remember to do when creating items in your Silhouette studio is to make sure that if you are doing a print and cut is to turn off the cut lines for items you only want printed and not cut out. Here you can see that after the page is printed and I run it thru my Silhouette, the only thing that will be cut is the outside edge of the tag and the middle circle. The default setting is to always add a cut line to anything you create so if you don't remember to turn these cut lines off your Silhouette will cut everything out.

I knew that I wanted to cut my photos so they were the same size as the tags and lately I have had a lot of fun printing and cutting photos with my Silhouette. I copied my tag shape to a new document and then edited and cropped the photos to the correct size first in Photoshop Elements. I saved the photos as a .png files because I find when I save files as a .png it will import into my Silhouette studio in the exact size I want them to be. If I save them as a .jpg it will open quite large and then I would have to scale them down. I prefer to skip that step and import exactly as I need them to be. 

In order to make sure that the photos are lining up exactly in the right spot for the cut lines I make sure that the tag shape is brought to the front so that I can lay the photo underneath to line everything up. To to this just right click on the shape and select Bring to Front.

Here you can see the print and cut all ready to go and the cut lines are exactly where they need to be. I just run a letter size sheet of photo paper thru my printer and then cut it on my Silhouette. It works perfectly.

To finish off the project I created a little envelope to hold the tags that you can see below. I closed the envelope with twine that wraps around two circles that I attached with eyelets, one on the front and one on the back. I dressed up the front circle using a super cute emoji die set that is from Studio Calico. I cut most of it in gold foil cardstock and the heart eyes are cut from red foil.

I also made a simple cover tag to go on top of the others that I created in my Silhouette as well. It was made using the text tool and the XOXO is a digital element from In a Creative Bubble. The five is a gold thicker that I had in my stash.

My husband and I wrote our messages on the backs of the number tags so that you can read the messages and see the photos at the same time. Its super cute and since its a surprise my daughter has no idea its coming so I can't wait to hear all about it after she sees it.

xoxo,