More Valentine's Day Cards...

Hello all, who else is getting snow today? We are supposed to get between 4 and 6 inches of snow in the D.C. area. My entire company got a work from home mandate today (but me, still being in the mentality of the north, even though I have lived here for 5.5 years, lol, didn't even think to check my email!) It was completely clear earlier, but started coming down around 11 and hasn't stopped since, so I am glad that even though I missed the email telling me to stay home, I was able to get home before the snow started! I am very thankful to be working at a company where the owner seems to genuinely care about the safety of his employees. That is a very rare find these days.

Anyhoo, enough talk about snow…. On to the crafty portion of this weather update… ;)  Today I thought I would share a few more cards that I created for the Cards from the Heart Card Drive for the kids at St. Jude's Hospitals (For more info, click on the heart icon in the right panel). I really struggle with age and gender neutral Valentine's cards, so this year I thought I would go with a new approach. First, I scoured Google Images and Pinterest for potential ideas that fit the necessary criteria and pinned them all to a board specifically for this Card Drive. Next, I went through all of my 8x8 and 6x6 paper pads and pulled out pieces of paper that fit the bill of being somewhat valentinesy (I just invented a new word. hah), but still not overly girlie. Then I pulled out all of the stamps and inks that I was going to use. This really helped when I sat down to start working on cards, because I wasn't having to scrounge around in my papers and stamps to figure out what I was going to use every time I went to make a card. In the end, I think my final count was 21, which is about double what I was able to get done last year, so I'm happy with that. Below are a few of my favorite cards of the bunch…

I used a combination of Inkadinkado stamps, Dear Lizzy stamps, and a Crafter's Companion image. I used my Spectrum Noir markers to color in the images and used pieces from a number of different paper lines (Pebbles, Dear Lizzy, Carta Bella, and Tim Holtz), some Tim Holtz twine, BasicGrey letter stickers, Darice layered felt hearts, Darice ribbon, and Dear Lizzy stickers to pull these together. I also used a Studio Calico wood venire open scalloped circle in this first card to frame the image, and simply added a black dash-line around the edge for a little added pop. 

Overall, I'm pretty happy with the finished products. There are some I for sure like better than others, but I think that by limiting my supplies and having a solid idea of what I wanted to do for a number of the cards definitely helped. Just goes to show, that it doesn't have to be red and pink to be a Valentine's card!!

 (This image is by far my favorite! Crafter's Companion has such adorable stamps!)