Tuesday, February 7, 2012

Baby footprints heart card- perfect for Valentine's Day!

January 2016
Hi everyone! Every year around this time this post gets the most views of any of my posts. So glad you guys like it! I just posted the Play Doh flower Valentine's Day cards I made last year and this year I made Salt Dough Glitter Heart Necklaces and Star Wars Light Saber Valentine's Day cards. Lots of unique, cute and easy card ideas so be sure to check them out!

For Christmas I had planned on making footprint ornaments of Cameron's feet to give to family. The kind where you smush your baby's foot into plaster and bake it. Unfortunately I waited too long and when I went to purchase the kits at the craft store they were all sold out. In fact every craft store in the area had long been sold out of them. Guess footprint ornaments are a popular gift during the holidays. Anyhoo.. I ended up coming across all kinds of inked footprint ideas. One in particular I loved- footprints overlapped at the heel to form a heart shape. Super cute!

For Valentine's Day I decided to make cards incorporating this idea. I knew I wanted them to have an old fashioned look so I went to Joann's Fabric and picked up a pack of red and white paper doilies found in the candy/cake making section. All the other materials needed I had at home.


First I needed to make the footprint hearts so I had to wait until Dave came home from work so he could help hold Cameron while I inked his foot and pressed the paper to it. (Turned out that Dave ended up holding Cameron, inking his foot AND pressing it to the paper while I just stood there. Oops.) You obviously need to work at fast as you can since baby's don't take kindly to their feet being held still for very long. After the first few Cameron figured out what was going on and started scrunching his toes or wiggling them when they were pressed to the paper so a few of them have smeared toes. One even has a tiny extra toe print! It really wasn't bad though and only took a few minutes. Cameron was more curious about the whole thing than annoyed with it.

Next I cut a template for the card making sure that it was large enough to cover all the holes in the lace detail of the doily but that it didn't stick out from behind it.


Then I chose the paper I wanted to use, cut it in half and then score the middle so that it would fold cleanly and easily.


Using the template cut the heart out of the paper making sure to leave a tab on the left hand side to keep the two heart sides connected so that it makes a card. Then use a glue stick to glue both doilies to the front and back taking care to perfectly align the hearts.


On the inside I used double stick tape to attach the footprint heart. I used tape because I feared using a glue stick would end up wrinkling or warping the paper. There were both red and white heart doilies in the pack. I ended up lining the inside of the white ones with pink paper because I wanted there to be contrast between the white paper footprint.



On the right hand side I wrote:
From the tips of my toes
to the bottom of my heart...
Happy Valentine's Day




Voila! Super easy, simple but personalized Valentine's Day card.

8 comments:

  1. This is such a great idea for grandparents at Valentine's Day. I'm definitely going to use this with my little one this year. Thanks for sharing!

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  2. This is adorable! What kind of paint did you use? I have tried the tempera paint but it seems too runny, it smears very easily :(.

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  4. I am trying to do the paper heart part but the hearts aren't connected please help!! I have the dolis I just need to get this part down.

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    1. Hi Sarah,
      I'm so sorry. Just saw that you posted this! You need to leave a tab on the left hand side. About a one inch section where the card will bend and stick together. So place the heart template about 1/8" from the card edge (where it connects and bends) Check out this post where I did the doily hearts again, it has a better picture of the cut out heart.

      http://janyclaire.blogspot.com/2016/02/salt-dough-glitter-heart-necklace.html

      I hope this helps you!
      Jany Claire

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    2. Ok thank you so much hopefully it will work! I did not mean to send two comments$

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  5. What kind of paint/ink do you use for footprint??

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  6. I used acrylic paint. The kind that comes in the small 2 ounce bottles that you can get at any craft store. It's water based so washes right off.

    Jany Claire

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