52 Things I Love About You Craft

With Valentine’s Day quickly approaching, I thought I would share my version of the project for those of you who may still need ideas for gifts for loved ones.  I made this project for my husband in October for our 3 year anniversary.  I thought it would be perfect since we were taking a trip this year and limited our gift budget this year.  I still wanted to give him something meaningful, so I looked around for a nice homemade gift.  As I talked about at Christmas time, I love making homemade gifts for people.  To me, there is nothing more personal than a gift made with my own two hands with the recipient in mind.  So due to my limited monetary and time budgets (hubby is only out of town one night a week, and I didn’t get home from work until almost 8), I knew this project would be a great choice.

What you will need:

• A regular deck of cards – I had a spare one around, but you can buy cheap ones at the dollar store.
• Hole punch
• Cutting instrument (Some kind of paper cutter would be ideal, but scissors will do)
• Binding materials (I used binder rings, but ribbon, string, twine ect would be fine too)
• Paper to print your 52 Things on
• Glue
• Various things for decoration (glitter, stickers, rhinestones, ect)

Many of you I’m sure you have seen this project before.  It’s been around on various blogs and pinned on Pinterest a lot.  The craft part is really easy, it’s coming up with the 52 things that tends to take a while. I spent a few hours thinking about the 52 things I was going to include in my book.  I ended up coming up with a few extra that I didn’t use (I did tell my husband about them later).  Once you get going, you’ll see how quickly you rack up the number of items.

Many of the tutorials I found had templates included that I could have used for the project, but I preferred to design my own since I could.  I wanted to make it fairly simple as well since I was limited on time.  I just chose to use use red and black outlines.  I typed in my 52 things, and printed everything out.  I printed just on regular cardstock, but many tutorials use photo paper.  I have a huge abundance of cardstock, so I just used that.  And a little tip, if you want to alternate colors every other card, make sure you do your numbering right.  I messed up the first time I printed and when I started laying every thing out before gluing, I realized my error and had to go back and retype, reprint and recut everything.

I used my rotary paper cutter to cut them out(this is a godsend, if you don’t have one, I highly suggest investing in one.  I bought mine for wedding projects 4 years ago, and have used it many many times since. Well worth the money). I also readied the cards by punching two holes on one side.  I used a binder clip to hold two cards together while I punched the hole.  That suggestion came from the tutorial on Peppermint Creative.  It worked really well.  I used a regular hole punch which was fine. Remember, when you are punching your cover card, think about which way it will be facing.  I wasn’t thinking when I punched mine, and did it in the wrong direction.  I “covered it up” by tying a ribbon through the holes.  It worked, but I would have preferred it without the ribbon.

Once I had everything printed and cut, I set to gluing. Now I had seen on a few tutorials, it was suggested to use a tape runner for gluing.  Maybe mine was too cheap, or I didn’t know how to use it properly, but that thing was a nightmare.  I had to do a lot more work fixing the stupid tape runner than I should have.  There was adhesive EVERYWHERE!  Along with an over abundance of swear words from me as I fought with it.  I also could have used 2 instead of just one because I ended up wasting so much. So next time, I would probably choose a different method for gluing, maybe modge podge, or glue dots instead.  This is also why there are no pictures from that part of the process, I was a bit frustrated and didn’t really think about the pictures at that point.

Once everything was glued I did a little decorating.  I had purchased glitter glue at the dollar store, and had some letters hanging around at home from previous projects, so I used those.  Or, leave it plain.  Really you can do whatever you would like.  That is totally up to you.  Once everything was dry, I added the ribbon to disguise my holes.

Last but not least, I assembled everything using binder rings.  I found these at Staples, and they were pretty inexpensive.

Overall, this project was great and I’m really glad I chose it.  The crafting, even with my mistakes and frustrations, was really easy.  This might even be a fun project to adapt for a child to give a parent for a birthday, Mother’s/Father’s Day, or any day really.  I enjoyed thinking of the reasons why I love and appreciate my husband.  And even better, he enjoyed reading why I love him.

UPDATE: After receiving several requests for the template I used, I decided to add it here for you to download.  The size for each rectangle is 1 1/2 x 2 1/2.  I made sure to alternate each color and put the red outline on the black cards and black outline on the red cards.  I used Imprint MT Shadow as my font.

PDF – 52 Things Template

If you need a different format, I might be able to get it to you.  I do have the original InDesign file for those few that do also have that program.  Please email us for other file format requests. I tried to create this in Word, and really it’s just not possible.  There are a lot of free PDF editors out there to download if you don’t have Acrobat to edit PDFs.  Or simply print it out and handwrite your 52 things.