Category Archives: Valentine’s Day

Hearts border punch for PPA challenge

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I haven’t done any challenges in a few weeks since I was in Spain without my carding supplies. So today I’ve created a card for this week’s Pals Paper Arts challenge and their colour inspiration.

PPA238

It’s screaming for a Valentine’s card and for once, instead of being a rebel, I went for it. I’d been wanting to use my Stampin’ Up! Hearts border punch and this seemed the ideal time.

Stampin' Up! Hearts Border punch

The pink pirouette is about 2 inches deep and I used the border punch for the top edge. I’d been expecting that it would punch the bottom edge and had a couple of cards designed with it but it looks as if I’ll have to redesign them! The sentiment is from the newly retired Good Greetings (hopefully most people snapped it up before its retirement, it’s a very useful set) and is stamped in rose red. I cut a 1/4 inch wide strip of basic grey and adhered that below the pink pirouette. I initially intended on adding another strip at the top, but it was too much. The base is rose red. Due to my dislike of grey, I would never have selected these colours but I actually like the grey with the rose red. That isn’t to say that there will be lots of grey and pink cards in the near future, but there may be one. Or two!

Back to Black

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I decided to indulge my love of order and symmetry (somewhat) with today’s card. I have to fight myself quite a lot to stop myself making everything centred and symmetrical since I know it just doesn’t look as good. But it’s hard!

Stampin' Up! Back to Black

So this is a 4 inch square of whisper white paper with a 4.25″ square black mat and a 4.5″ square (well 4.5 by 9 to be technical) card base of real red. I had sort of planned this in my mind and then found that I don’t actually have any single heart stamps. Oops. But I do have the sweetheart punch so I punched out a number from a sheet of Back to Black DSP and one from real red card. I was originally going to have five hearts but it was too much and cut it back to three. Although my sense of order wanted the red heart in the middle, it was too predictable. I used my beloved metal rulers to get the heart bang in the centre of the card (one of those times when it’s really handy to have multiples) and then it was much easier to get the other two in the right places.

The change in direction on this card means that I have more hearts punched out and also a nice strip of DSP which might work for a negative heart kind of card. I seem to acquire oddments that “could” work on another card faster than I produce single cards! I assume (or rather hope) that I’m not alone in this!

Hearts & a simple valentine

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This is a supremely simple Valentine’s Day card, but none the less effective for it. I was playing with my Stampin’ Up! Perpetual Birthday calendar kit, which has a lot of extra pieces, when it occurred to me that there are far too many heart stickers for the calendar and they’d be good on a card.

Stampin' Up! Ampersand TIEF

I had an ampersand embossed piece of very vanilla cardstock on my desk and this card just fell together. Almost. First I had to redo the dry embossing so that there was room for the sentiment. I originally was going to use the blushing bride stickers and ink and card base but it seemed a bit too subtle. Real red it is then for both the card base and the ink. The sentiment comes from a just retired set called Good Greetings. It’s sad that it was retired before we even got to all the celebrations that it mentions!

Seasonally Scattered for Valentine’s Day

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Obviously to a card maker, Valentine’s Day is a fairly important event. In the Holiday catalogue there is the Stampin’ Up! Seasonally Scattered set which had three stamps with season images around them. I’ve used both of Merry and Thanks. Now it’s the turn of the Love stamp.

Stampin' Up! Seasonally Scattered

Sadly it’s rather hard to photograph this beauty – the metallics do not work well with the camera. It definitely looks better in person. After using the embossing buddy, I stamped in versamark on real red and then sprinkled on the gold embossing powder. It’s magic seeing any embossing come to life, but a large stamp is even more exciting. I matted this with the gold foil (the brushed gold cardstock doesn’t stand up to the gold embossing in my opinion) at a quarter inch larger than the real red and then had a larger border of real red around the gold. The base is half an inch larger in all dimensions than the gold mat.

The envelope is lined with Maritime DSP which contains real red, coastal cabana, whisper white and night of navy.