Love from Scratch

Here’s a brain teaser for you: what’s better than giving your sweetheart a Valentine’s Day gift? Giving them multiple gifts! And what’s even better than multiple gifts? Bonus points if you said gifts that are almost as fun for you as they are for your Valentine.

Love tokens are the perfect way to check both of these boxes. Your Valentine can redeem a token whenever the mood hits them, and the beauty is that this gift not only keeps on giving, but the scratch off twist keeps the suspense going. It’s like opening a new present every time!

Materials

cardstock
printer
Cricut
scissors
stylus
metal ruler or straight edge
clear packaging tape
wax paper
metallic gold paint
liquid dish soap
paint brush
glue stick
pin or needle

A Heart of Gold

Let’s kick things off by making the scratch off stickers. Although Silhouette makes scratch off paper that would have been perfect for this project, I had to come up with an alternative because it’s out of stock until after Valentine’s Day! If you’re lucky enough to get your hands on it, you can skip to the next section.

Start by taping a sheet of wax paper to your work surface and covering it with strips of packing tape. My wax paper was a little less than 12 inches wide, so it was the perfect size for the Cricut once I rolled out a 12″ sheet. Make sure that the packing tape strips align without overlapping.

Here comes the magic! Mix 2 parts of the metallic gold paint with 1 part soap. You definitely don’t need to measure-just eyeball it, and you’ll be just fine.

Cover the entire sheet with a thin layer of paint. Wait for the paint to dry fully before following up with the next coat. In the end, I needed four coats to create an opaque finish.

Once the sticker paper is dry, upload the scratch-off heart template to your Cricut Design Space. Make sure that the heart measures 2 inches wide before duplicating it across the page.

Set the dial to Custom and select the sticker paper setting. Load the mat, press start, and you’ll have inexpensive scratch off hearts in about a minute. Kind of amazing what a little tape, glue, anad paint can do!

Love on Top

Next, download the love tokens and print them on cardstock. On the third page, the reward fields are blank so that you can fill them in with treats that will make your Valentine smile (or blush, as the case may be). This is your chance to have fun, so print multiples copies of this page and get creative. Cut them out carefully.

Now, back to the hearts. Peeling the wax paper away from the sticker is a tedious task, and to be 100% honest, patience isn’t one of my virtues. Luckily, after a little trial and errror, I found that putting a drop of water on the center of the sticker and lightly scratching it with a pin made the job much easier. Whew!

Let’s move on to the envelope. Cut along the solid lines only. Next, use your ruler and a stylus to score the dotted lines. Fold the tab at the side of your envelope in toward the middle and apply a little glue. Next, fold the bottom panel up and apply pressure. Fold the top panel down, and you’re done!

Slide your tokens inside the envelope, and get ready for days, weeks, or, dare I say, months of fun!