Hand Made Hand Print Cards

Every year that I have been a mother, I have made a Mother's Day Card featuring Lydia's handprints.  I always make four or five so that I can keep one (is it wrong to orchestrate my own gift?) and then we give them to Grandma, Grammy, Nana, and Auntie who all help me SO much in mothering my child. This year was no exception.

A few days before Mother's Day, I took Lydia over to the studio and pulled out the paper and the paints.  I showed her how to hold her hands together so that it made a heart shape between the two hands.

We used vellum for the paper so that I could have patterns and words behind the hand print, similar to last year. I used a full page for each, way more than I needed, but that way I didn't have to position Lydia perfectly.  Her prints went anywhere and I planned on lining them up and trimming them later.  When all the prints were made, I pinned them up to dry and let Lydia continue to finger paint.

When the paint dried, I selected some paper that looked nice under the hand prints and cut it to size.  I also traced out the basic shape of the heart between the hands and the edge of the empty space at the bottom.  This way I could plan a little for the lettering and designs that would go under the vellum.  I decided early on NOT to try to line up everything and print it all on one piece of paper.

Instead, I decided to print a page with all the Happy Mother's Day messages, cut those into strips and glue them to the bottom of the patterned paper.  Then I wanted to find a heart shape to glue in place.  I thought about cutting out paper, or a photo of Lydia, or doing something else with text that could be cut into a heart shape but nothing jumped out at me.

Then I remembered this contraption.  I won it in the "Just Something I Made" swag bag last year and haven't used it yet.  It is a punch and plastic sticky backed buttons, so that you can make custom buttons out of scrapbook paper.  The set I got just happens to be heart shaped!

Here are my custom heart shaped buttons!  The punch was pretty cool because it cut the shape and applied the pressure to attach the sticky button to the paper.  In the end it is just paper glued to a button, so these are for paper crafts and probably not for sewing.

Speaking of sewing, the button was getting sewn onto the top of the card, but I still needed to attach the vellum to the background.  I don't like to use glue with vellum because it shows through and looks messy.  I decided to use my sewing machine on the edges of the two papers.  Then I sewed the button through both layers and the card was finished!