Valentine’s Day Victorian Puzzle Purse Designs

Recently, my friends and I designed Valentine’s Day cards to sell at a pop-up shop for the Graphic Design Student Association at Louisiana State University. When I started working on designing cards for the sale, I went to Pinterest for some inspo and found a lot of these designs called Victorian puzzle purses. I’ve been trying to get more into crafting with traditional mediums since a lot of the work I do for graphic design is largely digital. I decided to try and design one of my own since it seemed like a fun and easy craft to take on, and I love how it came out!

I created the look by first figuring out how to a Victorian puzzle purse with just a plain piece of paper to work out the structure. It was a little challenging at first since I’ve never been too great at origami but once I had everything folded the puzzle just fit into place!

Once I had the dimensions figured out, I went into Adobe Illustrator to draft the grid. Since I still wanted the design to look handmade, I doodled all the illustrations on a piece of paper during class and scanned it in using Adobe Capture. I love how this keeps the texture of the drawings so it still looks hand-drawn even though it’s built in a digital program!

Once I put together all the elements to create a design on the squares, it was pretty easy from there since everything just needed to be mirrored! I added a paper texture to the whole design to add a finishing touch to the handmade feel and achieved this final result!