Apparently I now live in a part of the world where it’s nearly impossible to buy printing supplies IRL. Fortunately for me, there are ways of making prints without any formal printing supplies.

Anyway, one of my personal challenges for the year was to make my own Valentimes cards—or to be more precise, to print my own Valentimes cards. Last year’s cards were cross-stitched. For this year, I wanted to up my game since I started experimenting with printmaking last year.

Mission accomplished!

I’m pretty happy with how these turned out, considering the materials I used. It’s a cheap, jury rigged block print using cheap stamp-pad ink on cheap craft store card blanks. But the point was to make prints—not to stress myself out over making the perfect prints.

Love is the point, anyway.

Step 1: figuring out what you want to print. The trick to this, as with any artistic medium, is to limit your design to something that can be executed with your materials. (This is a good thing to keep in mind when you’re tasked with making good-looking documents in Microsoft Word.)

For this card, I took inspiration from vintage playing cards—the type where the image mirrors itself over the center line. I was especially inspired by these vintage zodiac playing cards.

Step 2: translating the sketch into a print block. This is when I discovered that my sketch was a liiiiiiitle bit ambitious for my print medium and the size of my cards. That’s okay, we just simplified the sketch.

This is a really easy block to make—it’s craft foam white-glued onto foam core. $4 worth of supplies, and I can make 10 more print blocks with the leftovers. Definitely use sewing scissors for this, as they’ll get you more precision (but don’t ask the craft foam to be super-precise; it won’t happen).

Step 3 (not shown): let the print block dry for an hour. Otherwise the white glue will just slip-slide itself off the print block.

Step 4: print! I used a cheap rubber stamp ink pad as my “brayer” since I don’t have one yet. The flat surface of the stamp pad made it easy to swipe ink onto the print block without getting too much onto the backboard.

To make the print, I used a French rolling pin and some elbow grease. It wouldn’t be my choice for bigger prints, but for my purpose and materials it worked just fine.

Step 5: voila, the finished product! I may add some accents with gold acrylic paint to add some fun details.

I love that I have a Valentimes card that I designed and made. I’ll be sending these babies out to friends and family next week—and hopefully put a smile on a few faces.