For some girls, it’s shoes but for me, it’s stationery. I just love it! There’s something special about a brand new notebook, full of possibilities, ideas to be jotted down, doodles, drawings, note-taking, quote-writing and list-making.

I recently discovered The Stationery Place blog and its homemade Valentine’s Day card swap. I thought it would be a great way to get me to be a little creative on paper and to come up with an original idea for a Valentine’s Day card!

I wanted to find an inspirational quote about love which was familiar enough, but not overused. I began thinking about the quote “Love is blind” and its meaning. Then I wondered about doing a card spelling out the word “Love” in Braille as a play on this. I wanted to go deeper though, and looked to see what Helen Keller had to say about love and blindness. I read her story many times over as a child and I seemed to remember she was incredibly inspiring. I wasn’t let down:

“The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched. They must be felt with the heart” ― Helen Keller

Pure beauty in those words – and I wanted to write the quote in a white pen on white card, so that the recipient has to tilt the card in order to read it. The card would then reflect her words: a combination of something one touches and something which is difficult to see.

The trickiest part was figuring out how to make the Braille bumps. An online translater gave me the pattern to use, and I was inspired by Greg Mathews’ tutorial on embossing paper.

I used a regular hole punch and made the pattern in some card. The pattern was then taped onto the red paper I would be adding the Braille to – checking to ensure the pattern would come out the correct way!. I then carefully used the wooden end of a fine paintbrush to push through the bumps.

Here’s the end result:

homemade-valentines-card

homemade-valentines-card-2014

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