52 Reasons I Love You

If you're on Pinterest, I'm sure you've seen a bunch of these tutorials by now, but I'm still going to share mine.

Here is the final product!

I made this bad boy about two years ago now - before I even knew about Pinterest! (Did things really exist before Pinterest!!?)
I was looking for a thoughtful, heartfelt gift to give to my boyfriend for our one year "anniversary." I was perusing the Internet looking for a creative spark when I stumbled upon this website: The Dating Divas. They have TONS of crafty gift and date ideas. This is where I originally saw the "52 Reasons" deck. At the time, my boyfriend was learning a bunch of super awesome card tricks so this was perfect! One of their guest bloggers had a great tutorial on how to make it and came with some great tips. I managed to track down that blog thanks to Pinterest! Here is it if you'd like to check it out: Instructions.

What You'll Need:

• A deck of cards
• Hole punch
• Two binder rings
• 52 reasons why you love your boo thang
• Labels (or paper to make your own labels)
•  Optional:
• Brown & White paint to age your cards
• Stickers/gem stones to add throughout the deck
• Photo of the love birds

You'll notice the vintage worn look of the cards in the Papervine blog. I had already bought a regular deck of cards and was eager (more like too impatient) to make it, so I opted out of waiting 7-14 days for an overpriced deck of cards to be delivered. SO, I grabbed some brown and white paint and a few paper towels and started to distress the regular deck of cards to give them that same vintage feel. Here are a couple of close ups of how it turned out:

Here is the inside cover

Here is the back cover.

I mixed the white and brown paint together to make a rusty cream color. Then I painted 3 cards at a time, allowing the paint to dry enough so that it stayed on, but not fully to where it covered the card entirely. Then I wiped each card with a paper towel to get that scratchy aged look. I repeated this on all 54 cards (both Jokers included) and then also did the backs of each card.

Once all the cards were dry, I punch two holes in every card for the binder rings. Then, instead of making my own labels, I decided to buy the $4.99 PDF from the Papervine Shop. Here's a sneak peek of what you get for the $4.99:

Photo Credit: Papervine

I liked the clean look of the font and the scuffed look of the labels that went well with the vintage look I was going for. From here, I wrote down all of my reasons on a piece of paper before writing them on the final product. Once all of the reasons were done, I made sure the cards were in order by "face/suit" and "number." (NOTE: You don't have to do so, that just made the most sense to me). I then glued them all in order and slipped them into the binder clips.

Here are a few photos of the cards with the labels on them:

I LOVE the way this came out. However, now that two years have gone by and I'm blogging about it, I wish I had taken more time to create my own labels and type each reason into the box to get an overall clean look for the project.

Happy crafting!
xoxo