A secret valentines’ love message

Published in Issue 20, December 2012

Written by Nicola from Cutie and The Feast

A secret valentines’ love message 

What you will need

Some cardstock to use as the base of your card

Scraps of card or other embellishments as decoration

A long match

Double sided tape/glue to assemble your card. 

Pilot  Frixon pen

Ordinary biro (in a colour that matches the Frixon pen).

Single hole punch

Step 1. You’ll need to decide on what you want your hidden message to be and then the text that will hide the message. 

For  example, my hidden message will be “ I Love You” The text that I’m going to hide this in will be:

The principle is that anything you write with the Frixon pen will disappear when exposed to heat as this is an erasable pen. 

You will need to write your hidden message with an ordinary biro and the surrounding text with the Frixon. The text in red should be written with the biro and the text in black written with the Frixon. But remember to use the same colour pen otherwise it won’t be a secret message!

When you think about hiding your message you can use whole words, letters or just parts of letters to make up the text. 

Step 2. Decide on the size of your text. If you want to include a cupid’s arrow match then you’ll need to make your text a little bit smaller than the diagonal length of the match. 

Step 3. Write out your message and remember to swap pens! 

I’ve used a piece of white card cut into the shape of a heart and mounted on some red glitter card.  Its quite simple but I want the focus to be the magic text. 

Step 4. Make a cupid’s arrow match by cutting a small piece of red card into the same of a heart and gluing to the end of the match.  Lay your match diagonally across the heart and mark where you are going to punch holes. Using a single hole punch, awl or anything you can make a hole with punch two holes so that you can slot your match through. 

Step 5. Assemble your card and add any additional embellishment. You will need to hold the card a little way above a flame so it’s best not to use anything that could get in the way and catch fire.