Are you the parent of a little one or a schoolteacher with a certain lovey-dovey class party looming? With Valentine’s Day only a week away, you may be finding yourself scrambling for creative mailbox ideas . . . and there are plenty of fun designs right in the Silhouette Design Store to help you out.

I chose two cute mailbox designs and personalized them a bit for my niece and nephew with the new Printable Rose Gold Foil Sticker Paper.

Supplies Needed:

Designs Needed:

STEP ONE: CUT YOUR BOX DESIGNS

If you’re just starting out with your Silhouette machine, 3D designs can be a little intimidating. This is a great project for beginners and I have some tips to help you out along the way!

When you open the puppy valentine box design in your workspace, you’ll notice that the designer has already filled the shapes in with certain colors to help you figure out which of your materials correspond to each shape. If you’ve chosen a different design and the shapes are not filled in, you can easily plan out your cutting by color-coding the shapes yourself using the Fill Color Menu (indicated by arrow).

I cut the body of my mailboxes from double-sided patterned cardstock, but I used adhesive cardstock for the head and feet of the animals for easy assembly.  Inking or chalking the edges of your cut pieces can help add dimension to otherwise flat portions of a 3D design.

STEP TWO: ASSEMBLE YOUR VALENTINE MAILBOX

In addition to sometimes color-coding their designs, many designers leave helpful instructions or even links to photo tutorials in couple of different places. If you’re having trouble assembling a 3D craft, try looking here:

Description Box in the Design Store

Do a search in the Design Store and pull up your design’s specific page. Under the header, you will see a description box that usually has tons of helpful information for cutting and assembling the project. In this case, the designer also left a link to a full tutorial with photos of the assembly (indicated by arrow).

Properties Window in your Silhouette Library

The same information can often be found in your library in Silhouette Studio®. Simply search for the design in your library, right-click on it, and select “Show Properties” (arrow 1). A window will pop up that may contain additional instructions or a link to a tutorial (arrow 2).

Using the designer’s photo tutorial, this puppy box was assembled in less time than it takes to cut all of the cardstock!

STEP THREE: PERSONALIZE YOUR VALENTINE MAILBOX

For a personal touch, I added my niece’s and nephew’s name to their mailbox using Silhouette Printable Rose Gold Foil Paper. This material cuts beautifully even with the most intricate of designs, so hair-thin upstrokes on hand-lettered fonts like this one are no problem!

To create the shadow layer for each name:

  1. Select the name and open the Offset Window.
  2. Click on “Offset”.
  3. Change the Offset Distance to 0.050 in.
  4. Click “Apply”.

Layer the rose gold foil layer onto a shadow layer cut from black adhesive cardstock and press it onto the front of the mailbox.  Embellish with a few coordinating hearts (I used the negative cuts from my animal’s feet).

STEP FOUR: COLLECT ALL THE VALENTINES

Now that your little ones have the cutest Valentine’s Day mailboxes in class, you better get started on the cards they’ll need to hand out! Be sure to search the Design Store for loads of different valentine ideas, including the easy Print & Cut cards pictured above.

What Valentine’s Day crafts will you be creating?