DESCRIPTION Marian's Valentine's Day Cards CLIENT Self-non-promotion DATE February 2010 DESIGN CREDITS Heart by Marian Bantjes Holiday Cards by Various PRINT CREDITS Arkwel Industries (Laser Cutting) TYPE CREDITS Brush Script (used, jokingly, for inserted explanation of the card)

QUANTITY PRODUCED 500 PRODUCTION COST $800 PRODUCTION TIME 1 Week DIMENSIONS: WIDTH × HEIGHT × DEPTH 4.25 in × 4.25 in PRINT METHOD Laser Cutting PAPER STOCK Mixed, Various Weights

On top of the kind, humorous and long-lasting friendship, one of the perks of being friends with Marian Bantjes is that you receive in the mail the most wonderful surprises when you have just begun to wonder why nothing fun comes in the mail anymore. On a regular, yearly basis you can expect to receive an envelope in Halloween and one in Valentine’s Day. The latter is especially satisfying as Marian is able to transform the trite clichés of the holiday into something unmistakably awesome.

We also follow Marian on Facebook, and around the end of December and beginning of January she started asking for all those holiday cards people receive and might eventually throw away. A mysterious request but one that was well obliged. A few weeks ago we received our Valentine’s Cards from Marian and it all finally made sense: Recycling all those doomed holiday cards, she created a heart design that she used to create some lovely laser-cut cards, all of them unique in their own way as they all were different papers, colors and textures. It wasn’t all fun and games obviously, as Marian explains:

I learned that laser cutting is quite sensitive to thickness of stock. I had to sort all of the cards into different weights (using just a snap of the paper to guess at relative weights) and supply them to the laser cutter in 5 batches of sorted approximate weights.

Now, we patiently sit by the mailbox until Halloween.

Images above provided by Marian, photos below of our two hearts by us