I "Paper Heart" You

Seeing as how Dac and I recently moved across the country and don’t have a ton of cash money to throw around, we decided to have a budget-friendly first anniversary. Rather than buying each other a gift, we chose to make a keepsake together for our “paper anniversary”. (Our anniversary dish towel from Anthro will always remind us which anniversary it is. Man I love their home stuff.) 

Katie and I have been eyeing this heart art on Etsy by London artists Sara and Bendrix (we noticed Emily Henderson recently blogged about their work too)! A couple of their crazy great pieces:

Their idea of personalizing their heart art inspired Dac and I to try to create our own (less impeccable) version using our wedding materials – a way to forever archive all of our wedding keepsakes where we can see them every day – on the wall! The project was kind of tedious – especially the gluing part… but actually pretty simple. 

We took a trip to Michael's, where we found (jackpot!) the perfect heart punch by Martha Stewart. We also picked up a 16x20 shadow box-type frame (they only had black, so I painted it white since I like the white frames Sara and Bendrix uses) and a white matte board (we had to get a bigger size and cut it down). Then the only thing left to do before beginning the project was to dig through all of our wedding materials and find some extras we didn't mind cutting up! 

Making the McCabe Masterpiece...

First, we cut the matte board, and I drew a grid in light pencil to see where our hearts would go and how many we would need. This part was a little tricky, because I had to space them out so that there would be the same amount of white space around the edge. I kind of got lucky with it, and the ruler helped. Then it was on to the fun part - punching out the hearts. :) We punched out 117 of those little cuties.

 

Then it was on to folding each one in half (other than a handful we decided to leave flat - that decision driven mainly by the fact that some of them were too thick to fold and still look pretty).

After that we glued each of them to the board (using Martha Stewart craft glue), following our grid. We kind of alternated them so some would be facing different directions - whatever looked best. After applying the glue to either one side of the heart or the spine, I just pressed it down for a few seconds until it felt secure. The glue worked wonderfully.

Here is the finished product out of the frame...

And in the frame!

The whole project took around 6 hours. I'm pretty proud of the way this turned out - I don't think I've ever had a craft project go so smoothly. There was a lot of pressure on it... since it's an anniversary keepsake we almost had to keep it around no matter what. But I think it's more than worthy of our wall.
I would say we put our "hearts" into it. ;)