This adorable 3D Valentines card that I made for my sons 1st grade class this year is super easy and best of all, CHEAP!

Here is a quick step by step;

I took a few pictures with my son holding his hand out as if he were holding something invisible and selected the one I felt best fit his personality. I didn’t want him to just be smiling, I wanted it to be as he would if he were handing someone a lollipop in real life to get the real 3D effect. This is the one I chose;

I don’t have an Iphone with the fancy text app’s, and I didn’t have any special apps on my android, so I decided the easiest way for me to edit and add fun text to the picture is to use the Paint program on windows. I had to download the fonts that I wanted onto my computer via dafont.com and there were so many cute ones to choose from. I selected some of the Valentines ones and also used one called “Kindergarten” for his name. I then opened my Adobe Photoshop light app that came with my Windows 8, and I edited the colors to my liking. Here is how it came out;

Lastly, I had to get the photo’s printed, and due to it being right up the street, I chose Walgreens. Unfortunately, even with my attention to detail when cropping according to their ‘4×6’ picture specs, they still winded up printing it to less then expected standards in color, including chopping the bottom portion of his name off… In the sheet that shows how it should look from their printing sheet, it shows correct. Not sure what happened, but I am not too thrilled with this so I need to go back and have them fix this.  All in all, through Retailmenot.com , I was able to get 40% off picture orders and I got 30 of them for just $5.22 with tax and in-store pick up!

All that’s left to do is add the lolipops (I used tootsie pops due to the size of the stick and pop giving the effect I wanted, but you can buy a while back of cheap ones at the dollar store to save even more money!). I had a box cutter that made it easy for me to get precise cuts.

Then just add the lollipop and that’s it! You’re done!

I plan on adding a sheet of card stock behind these so they aren’t as flimsy since the lollipops are a little heavy, but it isn’t needed.

Did I mention I made all 30 of these for just $7??!!!