Signs aplenty for Valentine-themed Fudraiser

The signs I made for our silent auction donations to the church Valentine dinner and dance were such a hit with my husband who is a part of the group that is putting on the dinner, dance, and silent auction, that he asked me to make some simplified version for several of their other 'big ticket' donations.

When I was making my own signs, I noodled over how to get my signs to stand up on a table behind a bid sheet in order to be attractive, visible and valentine-themed. On a visit to my local Michael's store, I discovered 7.75" by 7.75" unfinished wood picture frames in which the photo window is heart-shaped. I liked them because they stand up with the aid of a small dowel. All very low tech and simple. Best of all, they cost $1.00 each!

 

 

For our signs, I had covered the frames with printed cardstock and attached the details of our items. For these frames, I didn't want to put a lot of time into them and wanted to keep it simple, so I decided to cut some patterned cardstock as an insert into the heart window and attach another heart onto which I had printed the item's details.

To get the exact shape of the heart window, I took the cardstock insert that came with the frame, scanned it, saved it as a jpeg, and imported the jpeg into my Silhouette Studio. I used Silhouette's trace feature to find the correct heart shape (You'd be surprised how different hearts can be!) and then cut out the hearts in a few different cardstock patterns. These formed the base background.

To make the scalloped hearts that have the details of each silent auction item, I selected a scalloped heart, made an internal offset to highlight the cute scalloped edge, selected a font that I liked, filled it with a pinkish-red color, adjusted the line settings to give each letter a black outline, then used my Silhouette's print and cut feature to first print and then cut.

I've created several different hearts to embellish the frames a bit more. Some of them I popped up and some I embossed with my Cuttlebug.

I really do like popping embellishments up, but I find the pop dots to be kind of pricey for what they are, so I make my own. It's very simple and very cheap. I purchase the sheet foam (12" by 18") from Michaels and use an ordinary hole punch to make dozens of little circles. Then it takes just a dab of glue on each side to affix and pop up my little embellishments. I also have a teeny tiny hold punch and have made those too for when something tiny is in order.

I'm so proud of my signage! I hope they make the silent auction attractive and festive.