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Father’s Day, Part III (Cards)

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The number of times that I say, “oh I can just catch up on sleep later” just to craft is pretty ridiculous. Crafting is addicting. And so is pinterest. Today’s project was to create Father’s Day cards for Daddy B, my dad, and my father-in-law. I’ve been seeing a lot of ideas on pinterest for DIY cards… All way cool, way more thoughtful, and way cheaper than the store bought ones.

I personally prefer something sentimental when I receive cards (or gifts). When I receive cards with a thoughtful message, I love to keep them. I find that they’re a good “pick me up” to read on a bad day. If you’ve ever read The 5 Love Languages, then this “love language” is considered “receiving gifts.”

Basically, the books identify five ways that people feel cared about and if you go to their website then you can take a test to see what your love languages are. This love language is so important to me that I try to take it seriously for others as well, even though I have a terrible memory for holidays and I don’t generally go crazy celebrating any holiday. My favorite thing is to find meaningful gifts for others. So making special cards is just really awesome. Here’s the book if you’re interested. I actually haven’t read it quite yet, but it’s high on the list… I wish it wasn’t so painful for me to read nonfiction. My aunt and a few clients have all discussed how great it is.

I have a ton of card stock paper for my computer and quite a bit of scrapbook paper as well. These two tutorials inspired me so I combined them both for Daddy B’s card from Godric and Mommy:

Cut out a couple of rectangles for the insides of my white cardstock and used mod podge to glue it down. I think a glue stick may have come out a little neater.
Traced my hands on the back of some pretty scrapbooking paper and cut them out.
My crazy love hands!
Cut out a couple strips of matching scrapbook paper for the accordion and folded them up accordion style.
Glued the strips to the back of my hands so that when the hands were “in position”, the strips would have their “pretty side” up.
Glued the other end of the accordion strips to the inside of the card.
Traced Baby G’s hands… not as easy as I hoped, but easier than I thought it’d be.
Erased the pencil marks, added my message, and glued JUST the hands to the big hands.
Inside of the card. The hands can be extended out so the whole message can be read. Unfortunately, it doesn’t just open all the way when the card is opened. Maybe there’s a way to do that, but my brain couldn’t quite figure it out… not today anyways.
For the front, I wrote a Happy Father’s Day message with white color pencil. This was not particularly easy to do because it’s hard to see what you’re writing. Oops.

I had to take care of this part at work because all of my watercolors are there. I have a ridiculous amount of art supplies at work, considering how much I have at home. I work with kids and sometimes we do art projects as part of therapy so I have markers and crayons and color pencils and watercolors, etc. All I did was use some water colors to paint over the areas where I’d written in white color pencil. Pretty easy, but it’s more time intensive than I expected…. there’s a lot of dunking your brush in water, back into the paint, paint a little, then repeat in watercolor painting… and that was a LOT of card. I wanted it to look sorta messy so I didn’t paint the whole page perfectly.

Here’s the final product (be careful not to get watercolors on the inside like I did, sigh):

For the Grandpas, I used (roughly) this tutorial, except I didn’t print anything out… I just cut as I went to make the heart, collar, tie and pocket. To make the heart, I folded my paper in half length wise, then in half the other way, then cut out the heart, with the top of the heart being at the fold (don’t cut the fold, of course).

I searched online for what monograms for a D and C look like and just imitated them with a color pencil.
My final products! Add gooey message inside and you have an attractive and thoughtful card for the Dad in your life!

Just to finish off Daddy B’s gift, I bought him this cool Root Beer making kit off Amazon so he can do a little “do-it-yourself’ing”:

I was going to do an additional gift for Daddy B, but decided to save it for our upcoming anniversary… It’s our 2nd wedding anniversary which is perfect because COTTON happens to be one of the “materials” that is traditional. Look forward to that soon, as we will be celebrating on July 3, 2012.

EDIT/ADD: I forgot to mention that I also did these photo canvases. We’ve got some already, but I wanted to do some more with the special pictures that I took for Father’s Day. I did this project for Christmas Presents 2011 where you take an art canvas, use mod podge (matte) on it, place the same size photo on top, wait for it to dry, then mod podge over it all.  For these, I had a bunch of the flat panel art canvases which work really well! To make a hang tab, I usually use the tabs off soda cans, but my massive collection of upcycle items only had one of the soda can tabs (we’ve been dieting) so I used one of the beer bottle tops that Daddy B has been collecting for… years. I’m not sure what he was planning to do with them, but hey! They saved the day! I just hot glued one on the middle of each canvas where I wanted them to hang.

What I ended up using to make a hanger to hang the pictures from.
What I usually use to make a hang tab for pictures/frames/etc. Just a little hot glue does the trick. But I only had one, yet I had two photo canvases!
Completed canvases!
Hanging up. Just for a second because I had to wrap them up!

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