Robin's Birdhouse: Hubby's Valentine - shhh don't tell him it's posted

Saturday, February 9, 2013

Hubby's Valentine - shhh don't tell him it's posted

There are two holidays where I have trouble designing cards. I'm always disappointed in my Valentine's Day and Easter cards. Valentine's Day is romantic and my cards are usually cute and funny. And Easter is a nightmare for me because I don't usually think in pastels. I'll worry about Easter later. Tonight I tackled hubby's Valentine.

I've been trying to add more layers and textures to my cards so I knew I wanted to use my Cuttlebug in some way and I decided I would use die-cuts. I have two different dies for similarly shaped flowers so I got them out to have a variety of sizes to choose from. The design came to me when I saw the black & cream music note paper.

I cut out all of my flowers and placed them randomly on a sheet of card stock to determine the size card I wanted to make. I settled on 5x7 so that most of my background stencil would show and I could use the largest flower without it being cramped. For my stencils, I chose a swirly background that I sponged on in Vivid Garnet ink. I added three random patches of checkerboard sponged in Vivid Cobblestone and a leaf pattern sponged on in Vivid black. I glued down my flowers, added three different sizes of red gemstones using Helmar's Gemstone glue and stamped two sayings, "love" and "xoxo", which were also in Vivid Black ink. To pull the whole design together I sponged Vivid Garnet all along the outside edges of the paper and the tips of the flowers and then mounted the panel on black confetti paper.

I like it. It's got a lot of different layers while keeping to a minimal color scheme. I'd love to know what you think! Drop me a line sometime.