Weddingbee Blog

Like many couples, Mr. Taffy and I love to text. We still text daily, but we were especially obsessed with sending messages in the beginning of our relationship! Last February, when we had been dating just over a year, my phone was finally filled to the brim with cute, sweet (and sometimes sassy) messages. I decided to make Mr. Taffy a Valentine’s Day text-book (hee!) using the messages as a theme.

I started with these basic items from Jo-Ann’s:

A package of medium and small crafting tags, a spool of black ribbon, a package of small vellum envelopes, and a glue stick. I also found some metal rings to use as a binder.

Then, like a crazy fool, I typed up EVERY message in my phone. That phone held up to 200 messages! I even typed the messages like this:

So they would
appear exactly
like they did when
viewing them on
my cell phone.
02/06/09

Then I placed the date on the bottom. The messages that were stored in my phone that I had sent did not have a date, so you could tell who sent which message. After typing them up, I printed them out and took them to Kinko’s to copy them onto transparent sheets (this was kind of an unnecessary step). Then I organized them in chronological order (his messages were already in order, but the sent box in my phone was all scrambled), cut them all out, and pasted them onto the tags.

The pasting part sounds easy, right? Of course I had to make it more complicated than it sounds. Using the vellum envelopes and small tags, I created “hiding places” for the text messages. Here is an example with the envelopes:

I put the message in there face down, so you wouldn’t be able to read it without doing some work. Then I sealed the envelope with a sticker.

I also took part of a large tag and glued it onto a full tag, to make a pocket. Then I pasted the text messages onto a small tab and attached a ribbon to act as a pull. I put some leftover stickers on the front of the pocket:

No, you can’t read the whole thing!

I also used the type of fasteners that you find on the back of manila envelopes to make a “door” to put the messages behind. I had a really good time layering all of these methods, but it was quite time consuming!

How many messages are hidden in this picture?

For the very sassy messages, I recycled some stockings that had a tear. I made a “door” like the one in the picture above, and wrapped a piece of the stocking around it, giving it a corset-ish effect. I put a black bow at the top.

Here’s the view from the side when it’s open:

Whew! Just looking at these pictures reminds me of how much work this was. Mr. Taffy loved the gift, and I always have fun looking back at our cute text messages.

Are you planning a Valentine’s Day DIY gift?