From 2014-2016 I chronicled my crafty endeavors on the site Adventures-in-Making. I’ve selected a few of those DIY’s, Recipes, and other posts to share on the site.

Valentine’s Day has always been one of my favorite holidays, probably because I’m a big mush at heart. I like to think of it as the Thanksgiving for love– a chance to tell the people you love how special they are, and how much they mean to you.

This year I thought I’d turn all those ideas into a keepsake– a Love Letter Book that two people can pass back and forth until it is filled with compliments, thanks, and well wishes. It’s a perfect activity for kids or adults, and needs only a couple of basic supplies (and the free templates included below.)

Supplies

• A few sheets of colored card stock or scrapbook paper for your covers.
• A printer, and some basic text weight paper for your inside pages
• A pair of scissors
• A ruler
• A pencil (preferably a mechanical one, you’ll see why.)
• The template pages below

There are a couple of ways to transfer the template onto your card stock. You can print directly on the card stock (if your printer is up to that), cut out the template form and trace it onto the card stock, or (as I have done here) use transfer paper to transfer the lines to the paper you will use for your cover.

First I lined up the transfer paper under my template and over my card stock…

Then traced the outside lines with my pencil.
You can see that I also made a mark where the dotted line was on my template.

Using that mark, I used a the end of a mechanical pencil (lead retracted) to put a score line into my card stock. That will make for a better fold.

If you aren’t familiar with scoring- it’s a basic process that pushes down the fibers of the paper, and encourages the paper to fold on that mark. Since I am folding diagonally across a sheet of card stock, the score line makes a big difference.

After I have scored both sides of the cover, I use the smooth end of the pencil to burnish (flatten) the fold.

I then used the Page Template to cut out a total of 12 hearts, folded them in half, and made two stacks of 6. These will be the inside pages of our two halves of my heart book.

I took one stack and lined it up with the fold on one side of my cover.

I made a tiny snip in the bottom fold of the cover and pages to secure my string.

I cut two pieces of string/ribbon, 12″ each, and wrapped one around the cover and pages on each side, following the fold.

Then I tied the string firmly in a knot at the top of each heart, binding the heart books together, and leaving me enough extra sting to tie the book closed.