Crafty Corner: Woven Paper Valentine

Valentine’s Day is this week! While I love celebrating with my hubs I prefer homemade treats or doing something special together instead of buying presents (needless consumerism makes me feel kinda yucky). Our annual V-Day tradition is to go out for afternoon tea (which we did on Sunday despite the blizzard this weekend) but I wanted to make John a card too. I saw this adorable woven heart card on MiniEco. I followed their design but made a few of my own tweaks.

The materials I used for this project were:

A rotary cutter with self healing mat
Large acrylic ruler
Small ruler
Tape
Scissors
Utility bone folder
Colored paper
Blank white folded card
Pencil

The MiniEco card template can be found here but here is the design I created based off theirs:

I measured three .5cm margins and one .25cm margin around the outer edge of the card. Inside the margins, I measured and sketched out fifteen .75cm parallel lines.

Using my rotary cutter and utility blade, I carefully cut the fifteen lines on the front of the card.

When the lines were cut I erased all the pencil lines and folded the card to the opposite side for a clean look.

Using my rotary cutter and acrylic ruler, I cut the colored cardstock into nine 1cm strips.

Plotting out exactly how your design will look is totally up to you. You can use one solid color, three colors like I used, or graduated paper like on MiniEco. The most important thing is to get the pieces of paper as close together as possible. I used small pieces of tape to hold them in place as I worked.

The design is also totally customizable. The aim of this tutorial is to show the woven paper technique. I loved the look of MiniEco’s pixelated heart, and kept the white spaces at the top, but you can modify it to whatever look you like best. When the design is done, make sure to snip any excess paper and tape down the edges of the colored strips.

Bonus Project – If you have any leftover strips, you can make some cute confetti for the inside of the card. Just trim the strips down into tiny pieces with a rotary cutter or scissors.