Generally speaking, I’m not a sharer. Or a feeler. I have a hard time explaining my emotions in words. If I must, I prefer to convey my feelings by picking a somewhat expressive song and playing it loudly. Though according to the BF, after long silent treatments, I share my feelings “suddenly and without warning.” It’s true. It takes me a while to warm up to talking about my feelings, which is odd since I talk nonstop about everything else. But once I work up the guts to say whatever it is, I generally explode before I lose my nerve.
Like a few years back, when the BF and I were facing college graduation and hadn’t worked out any plans yet. Sitting in his Jeep, I was having trouble saying out loud that I loved him, and I’d really prefer us to move in together and not go our separate ways. I finally shouted, “LOOK, I just want you to change all your life plans and be with me, OKAY? GEEZ.” His response? He smiled real goofy and kissed me. I muttered, “oh god,” and walked away.
All this is just to explain to you that I really don’t do things like the project I’m about to show you. It’s not my style. This is just so freaking adorable, and I hate love hate being adorable. It’s so… barf-inducing sweet. I usually buy him some chocolate and maybe a shirt from the Gap. I’ve only done something cuter than this one time, and I’m certainly not going to tell you what that was.
Okay, enough stalling, this is what a made: A personal deck of Memory cards. Barf. But really, these are pretty amazing. They also took a loooong time, which I will be certain to convey upon presenting these to my beloved.
I took a deck of red playing cards and cut a whole bunch of coordinating scrapbook paper to cover up the number side. Then I cut a whole bunch of images from the interwebs. Of course, all in multiples of two so I’d have matching sets for my Memory game. I actually made way more than this picture shows, but you get a nice sample here.
B-t-dubs, I got most of the images from reusableart.com. It’s old stuff, which means there is no copyright. And it worked out pretty well for me since I was going for a vintage look.
I picked images that had meaning for us. For example, I picked this crane because that’s the BF’s spirit animal: balance, stability, and integrity. And by “that’s his spirit animal,” I mean that I spent ten minutes taking online quizzes on his behalf until I got an answer I liked and could find a good picture for.
And I picked this cat riding a bicycle because that’s my spirit animal. Ha.
I’ll admit, I made a few just because they were pretty, like this awesome owl:
Last, I made a title card. I used a 1 1/2″ circle punch to cut a hole out of the center of some cardstock. I centered this over the Ace of Hearts and then stamped the title. I was pretty pleased that our initials rhyme with “memory.”
I got everything to stick together with liberal amounts of Mod Podge. I laid out my cards how I wanted them on top of some wax paper. A layer of Podge on the card, then paper, a layer on the paper, then picture, a layer over everything.
Once I got the final layer of Podge on there, I used an old gift card to spread it even. It removed brush strokes and also flattened any air bubbles out from under the paper. I folded my wax paper in half over top of them and loaded all my cookbooks on top to make sure they stayed flat while they dried.
And there you go! Tied up with a bit of string, it made a very adorable Valentine’s Day gift. But use your imagination! This project could be done with a million different themes for a million different occasions.
Wine & Plum 