Mrs. B’s Corner

I made this valentine for myself to send this year. I copied the idea from this card:

I started with a precut white and blue card, using the blue for the inside. I decided to duplicate the look by making a heart mask that covers most of the front of the card and stamping the flowers in shades of yellow and blue. My message was a circle instead of a line so I hid it inside the heart. Here’s my duplicate:

Technical specs: a mask is a term used in graphic design. It basically hides some of the background so let a shape appear. To do that with paper, you use it more like a stencil. I grabbed a sheet of printer paper, hand drew the heart, and cut it out using an exacto knife. I then lined up where I wanted the heart to appear and taped it in place. The last step was to stamp.

Today’s greeting card is one I made for my Aunt. I heard she was having foot surgery so I thought I’d wish her a speedy recovery. It was very easy to put together after freehand stamping the messages (no guidelines) and cutting out the butterflies by hand.

Today was full of trial, error, and failure. I had this great idea for a pretty, simple card that didn’t turn out at all. Here are my tries:

I ended up using stamps from the same collection with different colors, a cute message, and a grass sticker.

When I started this card today the only thought I had was to weave some ribbon that I’ve had for a while. This led me to add some flower rub-ons using similar colors. I still had a lot of white space so I decided to stamp another flower and simple message using more blue and green. The final touch was matting the green onto blue and mounting it to the cardstock. I owed a friend of mine a note so I decided to use it for her. My handwriting is bad enough so I added some green lined paper to the inside of the card and wrote in blue ink. I hope she likes it!

Today’s card was quick and easy using a single stamp, pearl embellishments, and an orange heart. Side by side is the inspiration and my version.

Valentine’s day is around the corner! If you’d like a free handmade card, check out my love and friendship Flickr set then contact me with the card name, your name, and your mailing address.

Thanks!
~Shay

Today’s card is dedicated to my brother who had a birthday on January 26th. Love you, bro!

Stamping tip: To create a straight and centered message, draw pencil lines with a ruler and begin stamping in the middle of the word. Don’t forget to remove the pencil lines when you’re done!

I spent some time the other day flipping through magazines and stealing ideas. Today’s valentine is inspired by this card:

I started by pulling from my scraps all the different colors I wanted to use: black, red, white, pink, silver. I got lucky when I came across this quote: “Love is the master key that unlocks the gates of happiness.” I knew then that I could finally unwrap this fantastic key to my heart paper. It took me a while to visualize the end product so I started by making the card from black cardstock.

I started trimming my key paper because I knew I wanted to cut out at least one of the keys and use the backside for the upper left square. I also trimmed some red polka dot paper and began lining things up.

I wanted to use the scalloped edge so I trimmed down and inked the quote square.

I also cut out silver hearts, a key, and trimmed and inked the key background block.

I laid everything out on the card and realized I needed a bit more silver. I pulled out some silver glitter tape and saw that some of it was already punched perfectly for this card! I was finally ready to glue things down.

This is another design experiment. I wanted a more masculine valentine’s card but liked the design of this one.

Here’s the example and step-by-step photos:

And the final product:

*This post was written on January 2 before I had access to the blog.*

      

I’ve had these music stickers for a while and with the thoughts of Valentine’s Day I finally found a good use for them.