I designed a lace shaped heart Valentine’s Day card. For the inside of my heart I used a design I found in Cricut Design Space, but you could use your own design for the center. To find my lace shaped heart please head to my free library, which you can find here. If you need the password, then just click: get password for library.
Start out by downloading my design. Once you have the design in Cricut Design Space, you will need to do a few things to it. If you need help figuring out how to download things into Cricut Design Space, then check out this blog post I made. The first step is to make the lace heart your desired size. I made mine about 7 inches wide by 6 inches high.
I wanted my lace to be white, but my heart to be red. So, to do this I needed another heart. On the left hand side there is a button called shapes. There is a heart shape in here. If you click on the heart it will appear in your work space. Click on the heart, then click on the lock icon between the size measurements. The measurements should be unlocked, so you can change the height and width independently. Now either change the numbers in the size section or the image itself to get it to fit inside the lace heart. If you leave the size locked, then the height and width will change together, and it will be hard to match this heart up with my lace heart. For my heart the width was 5.638 inches wide and 4.597 inches high. A small amount of my heart shows through on the back of the card, which I liked. If you do not like this, then you will want to make your heart a little smaller.
You can change your colors of each piece to help you visualize what your card will look like. Just select the item you want to change the color of, and click on the colored square next to linetype. Both the lace heart and the heart you just made should automatically be set to cut as the linetype. Each piece will be cut out on a separate mat, so that you can use different colors of cardstock for each one. I cut these pieces out on 85lb cardstock with the fine point blade and my light blue mat. A green mat could also be used.
You can either write your message on the front of the card, the red heart, or I wrote my message on the back, white lace heart. You can use the Design Space design I used in my card, or make your own. If you use a pre made design, then you will just need to adjust the size to fit your heart. You could have your Cricut machine drawl a pattern or design in the middle of your heart or use the foil tool and apply your design in foil like I did. Just make sure to change your linetype to either foil or draw depending on what you are doing. You will also want to select your red heart (heart without lace), and the design you want on it, then click the attach button at the bottom right side of the screen. This will make sure these designs stay together when they are being made. If the attach button is not selected, then the machine will do these commands on separate mats, and your designs will not line up nicely.
When I was getting my foil ready and I accidently set it on my mat. The protective sheet was already removed… Well that was a waste of foil. It instantly stuck to the mat, and when I removed it, a lot of the foil was left on the mat. So, I had to get a new sheet of foil for my project. If you ever make this mistake I used tape to help get the foil off of my mat. It worked pretty well.
Once all of your pieces are cut out, it is time to assemble. I just used Elmer’s glue, but you could also use double sided tape as well. I looked at both the front and back of my card to make sure things looked lined up. You could also make smaller versions of this and give them as Valentine’s Day cards for a classroom.
