Classroom Valentine's Card with Living Hinge
Instruction
This set of four Valentine's Card offers a 'candy free' option for schools and classrooms that want to avoid those (for various reasons!). The living hinge holds standard crayon or thin marker. You can adjust the size of the circles for different types of media (color pencil, etc). The living hinge is flexible and durable and make a great little gift for a student to color.
This file has designs where you can adjust the circles on the living hinge to fit other size coloring utensils. The current size fits typical crayons, thin markers, and so forth.
Additionally, if you want to score the “From” and or “To” name, you would enter and size the text you want to fit in the space. This is optional if the names will be handwritten.
- For each card, make sure the living hinge, circles, and outline of the card are set to cut. I used basic 3mm Basswood setting of 100 power and 15 speed.
- Picture and all words should be set to either score or engrave. I used Score in this for timing but also to make texture a little more stable. If you want to engrave, feel free to do so but know there may be a little longer print time.
- Make sure the images fit within the marking of your wood / machine then follow settings to print.
The beauty of this project is there is very little assembly needed once it is cut and scored. All work is typically done on the front end in the XCS software if you are changing the holes for the coloring media, the words, or the design.
One thing I do since these are designed to be given as raw wood, is I clean up any burn marks. The first picture in this step shows the burn marks. I simply take a rag with some rubbing alochol on it and gently wipe the burn marks. The second photo shows how it looks after the small amount of rubbing. I let dry for a few minutes and then they are ready to put your color media in!