Are you giving out love letters for Valentine's Day tomorrow? If you are, here's a simple DIY you can use to give your letters that extra touch!
Firstly, tear your desired pages out of an old magazine. This not only saves paper, magazine pages will also give your envelopes a unique look! ...Don't frown at me for tearing up a Discovery Channel Magazine, I haven't touched them for years! It's justified! Any page would do, you can even use one that is just full of words, that would work too!
I'm using a WRMK Envelope Punch Board to make my envelopes for this project, but if you don't own one, its really simple to make one just by tracing the shape of an envelope onto the magazine page and cutting it out, like in this project.
For me, I was looking to make a 3"x4" envelope, so I followed the measurements on the board and cut my magazine page down to a 6"x6" square.
Score. Punch. Score. Punch. The envelope punch board makes it a breeze.
It also comes with a corner rounder to round the corners of the envelope. Once thats done, you just need to stick the folds together to get a complete envelope. But for this project, stitch the heart first before you do so!
Here's the slightly tricky part. Before attempting to stitch the heart, use a pencil and ruler to mark out all the places you intend to poke a hole into. For a striped heart like the one above, your holes just need to form the outline of the heart, and aligned like a mirror image. For a heart cross stitch pattern, I googled heart cross stitch and took note of how many 'x's I needed, and marked out the holes with a gap of 0.5cm in width and height from each other. After that, I use a needle to poke all the holes in advance to make things easier when it comes to sewing.
For the thread, I pulled 2 strands from the regular 6 strand embroidery floss to use (thickness of 4 strands after threading through the needle). For these hearts, my thread length seemed too short to complete a full heart, even when I cut them at 48 inches (before threading), so maybe you might want to try with a longer length of thread.
I watched this video to learn how to cross stitch a heart, but because we're stitching on magazine papers, you don't have to follow all the instructions. To start or end a thread just tie a knot at the back to secure it! Also take note, pulling too hard might tear the paper, so be gentle!
It'll take a bit practice but once you've got the hang of it, you'll be able to do it pretty quickly! You can also do this on thicker paper if you feel like magazine pages are too flimsy as envelopes.
And there you have it! A simple craft that you can use to dress up your love letters for Valentine's Day or any other day in the year. :)
Eunice
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