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Made With Love Gate Fold Valentine

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Made With Love Gate Fold Valentine

If you need another Valentine’s Day idea, here is the Made With Love Gate Fold Valentine that you can copy or use for inspiration. It’s kind of like the Z-fold card that I always say is so easy for us to make, but makes the recipient think you created something extra-special! Making a gate fold (or gatefold) card only requires one more score line than a regular card.

Start with the usual 8 1/2″ x 5 1/2″ piece of cardstock. I used Real Red. Score at 2 1/8″ and 6 3/8″ on the long side. Crease and fold on those score lines, and the two sides should meet in the middle. It’s just like a double-panel front door. You can open both doors and walk inside! To decorate, you can adhere a strip of designer series paper or a stamped panel on each of the two sides. These would likely measure 1 7/8″ x 5 1/4″. This would give you the normal margins we usually use for our other cards. I used the Made With Love Designer Series Paper.

For the focal point on the front of the card, I just used a square piece of cardstock and designer series paper. Die cut labels or other designs would also be fine. The Real Red square is 3 1/4″ x 3 1/4″. The designer paper pattern is 3″ x 3″. To adhere this to the card, you only want glue on the portion that will attach to the left panel of the card. Figure out or eyeball approximately the middle of this square and line it up where you want it. Make sure you only get adhesive on the portion that will attach to the card, leaving the other side with no adhesive. I usually hold my finger approximately where the middle is and pay attention to which side is which when I flip the piece over to apply adhesive. Then I open it up and make sure no adhesive has leaked out or shows on the inside.

Gate Fold Valentine Inside

Here is what the card looks like from the inside. You can see I added a Basic White 4″ x 5 1/4″ panel for a stamped greeting or written note. On the left side you can see how the square front piece extends out.

To decorate the front, I added a Real Red heart plus some ephemera. The word “love” and the two small gold hearts are found in the Unforgettable Times Ephemera Pack. These pieces are gold foil but other pieces are in different fonts and bright colors. These are perfect for scrapbooking but you can also use them for cards as you see! I popped up the word “Love” with Stampin’ Dimensionals.

If you want the two flaps to stay closed, you might want to add a belly band around the card that would slide on and off or tie a piece of ribbon. I didn’t really think about it until I had the card made but I liked it just fine the way it was. You could also add some gems or other embellishments if you wanted to.

Made With Love Gate Fold Valentine closed

Also, if you really wanted the two sides to stay closed, you could add just a tiny bit of Multipurpose Liquid glue to the right side of the square, let it dry, and then it can be opened and shut without a belly band or ribbon and probably will not even be noticeable.

We are down to the wire for making Valentines, but there is time right up until almost the time you want to hand the card to someone! Or mail it and say “Sorry this is late, but I wanted to let you know I was thinking of you!” Just think back to your elementary school years and reminisce about making valentines yourself with construction paper, white paste in a jar, and doilies!

Storybook Moments Village Gate Fold Card

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Storybook Moments Village Gate Fold Card

This Storybook Moments Village Gate Fold Card is made with the pretty Storybook Moments Specialty Designer Series Paper. You will find this paper and entire Suite in the Spring Mini Catalog. I had the idea of putting the patterned paper with little cottages on it on the inside of this card. When I looked at the diecut sheets and saw these two characters, I thought they looked like the lady and lord of the manor on the inside of the card!

This is called a gate fold card because the two sides of the card fold in and meet in the middle. There is nothing complicated about it! To make this card base, cut the Old Olive cardstock at 5 1/2″ x 4 1/4″ as always. Then score at 2 1/8″ from each horizontal end so that those two ends fold and meet in the middle. The inside panel will measure 4 1/4″ x 5 1/2″. When you fold in the two side panels to the center they should meet up perfectly. If they overlap a tiny bit which prevents them from laying flat, just trim as slightly as you can with your Paper Trimmer to help them fit next to each other.

On the inside center panel, I adhered the paper on the Storybook Moments DSP that has images of lots of little cottages. It looks like a little scene when you open the card. That paper would be 4″ x 5 1/4″. On the outside folded side panels, the DSP is cut at 1 7/8″ x 5 1/4″. This designer paper is “the other side” of the paper that has all sorts of different frames and designs in rectangles that can be cut apart to use on cards or scrapbook pages. As you can imagine, it was very difficult to cut into that paper to use the other side and ruin some of the images on the “main” side. But I really liked this leafy side so I gritted my teeth and cut into the paper! Sometimes you have to do hard things! 🙂

The center panel is a piece of Old Olive cardstock cut at 3 1/2″ x 3 1/2″. You can vary the size for your card if you want it smaller or a different shape. The layer on top is Flirty Flamingo 3 1/4″ x 3 1/4″. It happens to be an embossed piece of scrap cardstock in the package, embossed with a retired folder called Scripty. I decided to use it because I liked the little bit of texture it provided in the background, even though it is retired.

The two sheep characters on the square panel are images you will find on the pages of diecuts that coordinate with this Storybook Moments Designer Paper. That is why it is called “Specialty” paper because it has these extra two sheets of all kinds of diecut images, ready to go! These two “lords of the manor” are just glued flat to the card although you could pop them up on Dimensionals. They fit just right on that square.

The greeting is stamped from the Layers of Beauty Stamp Set which I haven’t used for awhile and almost forgot about. You will find it in the Stampin’ Up! Annual Catalog. I stamped it on a narrow strip of Basic White cardstock and flagged both ends. To help it work just a little better with the card, I sponged the edges very lightly with Old Olive ink and an old piece of sponge I had that Stampin’ Up! used to sell. You could use Sponge Daubers or one of the Blending Brushes. We used to do this all the time when I started stamping and I rarely do it nowadays, but I think it is the perfect touch sometimes.

When you adhere this center panel to the card, you will adhere it to the left front panel. Only put glue on the left side of the square so that it doesn’t also stick to the right side panel. Sometimes it’s hard to remember not to put the glue everywhere! Don’t ask me how I know!

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On the inside of the card, if the cardstock you used for the card base is rather dark, you might want to put plain cardstock on the inside of those side panels. I used Basic Beige which looks good with the cottage paper in the center. You can stamp a greeting or write a personal message on those plain inner panels. Or you could cut or diecut a plain piece for a greeting adhered to the inside center panel, even though it covers some of the cottages.

Any gate fold card similar to this one is easy to make so I hope you will try one!

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