Sweet on my Valentine

My Valentine, my husband will be away on a work trip this Valentines Day - but that didn't stop the kids and I in putting together some sweet treats and making a beautiful craft for him.

A friend saw these awesome little books made out of a deck of cards online - 52 Reasons I Love You... on each card is a sentiment of what I love about my husband - some of them are quite funny - some of them are very personal, each of them is made with love.  The box I decorated up and distressed.

 

 

 

 

 

 
 
 

 

 

I also made a little canvas with some burlap and canvas scraps.  I used my Dymo machine and some stamps.

 
 

And finally, the cupcakes.  Because what would Valentines Day be without something sweet?  Butter Pecan with cream cheese icing.  For the larger cupcakes I used a knife to drag the red icing into a heart.

Two new Copic techniques

I was inspired to make a Vintage card by a very creative talent; Lacey Stephens - see her blog HERE.  I used her tip of stamping the image in brown ink instead of black.  It made a world of difference.  I would love to have made my card with the new Bo Bunny "Snowfall" collection, but I haven't got my hands on it yet... so I settled for their 2008 collection "Winter Whisper"   I'll tell you something, Bo Bunny has come a L-O-N-G way in three years ... from single sided very thin paper, to double sided cardstock and all the 'fixins'!  I love the brown and blue together, so it worked well to give the vintage feel I was going for on this card/image. 

I stamped a Magnolia image, Fairy Dust Tilda, and coloured her in all blues and browns.  I double mounted it with Spellbinders and a bit of Webster's Pages trim.  I used a Bo Bunny trinket which was originally a dark tarnished copper colour, and heat embossed it white.  A little bit of glitter and twine and finished.

My second card encompasses a totally different technique, it is called "no lines" colouring.  How you achieve this is by stamping the image in a very pale colour, usually blue.  However I don't have any light blue ink, but I do have a Stampin' Up ink called Pink Pirouette.  It worked very well for my needs.  Everything I was reading online suggested that this technique is very difficult.  I didn't find it as difficult as I feared ... but I will say that this first image is NOT my best work, and practice will make perfect (or at the very least, better)  I decorated this card with some various Prima flowers and a pebble.  Some very old paper from my stash, from one of those large packages the your non-scrapbooker friends give to you for Christmas thinking that this is an awesome gift because it is 100 sheets of scrapbook paper.  What they don't know is that you will be using the backs of the same paper for white backgrounds as the fronts of the paper are such a Dog's Breakfast of colours and shapes that you will never use more than 3 or 4 sheets.  Well I think this was sheet 5 out of that package.

Let me know what you think of these techniques, please leave a comment; they are free, just like smiles at McDonalds!

~Lorena~