Easy custom Valentine's cards

When I was a little girl, Valentine's Day was the highlight of winter for me. Mid-February can be such a cold, gloomy time . . . but right in the midst of the winter gloom comes a holiday dedicated to love. And fun. And candy!

I still like to send and give Valentine's cards, but adult-sized Valentine's cards are a lot more expensive than the little greetings exchanged by schoolchildren. I wanted several cards to send to family and friends, but at $1 to $5 each, store-bought cards were out of the question.

Then I remembered that I had several photo cards left over from Christmas:

and in my stationery box I had some blank cards.

So I cut off the Christmas part of the photo cards

and printed a Valentine's greeting on my blank cards. (I have zero graphic design skills. I simply played around with fonts and spacing using my word processing software. My cards are the size of one-half of an 8 1/2" x 11" sheet, so I fiddled with the spacing until the sentiment appeared to be centered in the upper right quadrant of an 8 1/2" x 11" sheet of paper. I did all my trial printing on regular printer paper so as not to waste any of my cards.)

When the cards were printed with the sentiment, I simply used double-sided tape to attach my photos, and

Voila!

Custom Valentine's Day cards!

Hopefully the intended recipients of these cards aren't reading this post; otherwise, their Valentine's cards won't be much of a surprise. There are a couple of our neighbors who weren't around at Christmastime, so I think I'll bake some treats and deliver one of these cards with a plate of goodies. Don't you think that'll be fun?

What do you do to celebrate Valentine's Day?