A Victorian Valentine with Tea Bag Folding

I have been looking through the sampling of Valentine's Day cards in the Treasury of Greeting Card Designs from Dover and I find it interesting to observe the differences in today's Valentine's Day cards and those done in the late 1800's.

Two of the changes I noticed right away are that the cards of yesteryear used the color red much more sparingly and frequently incorporated violets, a flower which is not seen nearly as often in today's Valentine's cards. Roses were also popular, but were usually interspersed with other flowers as well.

Here's a card I made using one of the images from the Dover treasury as a base.

To create the tiles for the tea bag medallion, I loaded the image into Kaleidoscope Kreator 3 and zoomed in on the violets that were in the lower left corner. Here's the tile:

I printed it out at 1.75 x 1.75 inches. The fold I used can be found here:

http://www.handcraftedgreetings.com/tbstar.php

After folding the medallion, I gave it a border by mounting it on two, two-inch squares of dark green card stock. I also added a little pink jewel-flower to the center.

Materials & equipment used to make this card:

• 4" x 6" card blank (ivory)
• Art from Treasury of Greeting Card Designs
• 8 tea bag tiles
• Gold peel-off border
• Queen & Co. flower-shaped jewel
• Tea bag folding instructions
• Dark green card stock.