Quick and Easy Valentine’s Day Cards!

Aloha, all!

Welcome to the January Edition of Island Hopping!  This month Cheryl Hamilton (from Haiku, Maui) and I (from Hilo, Hawaii) share our fun ideas about how to make cards to celebrate Valentine’s Day!

I love to send out Valentine cards. But every year it seems as if, with everything else going on in the New Year, by the time I get to making them, Valentine’s Day is almost here. So, while I love making artistic cards with lots of die cuts, texture and embellishments, I really need to make my cards simple if I’m going to send them out to more than one or two people.

This year, with the beautiful Real Red and Flirty Flamingo “From My Heart Specialty Designer Series Paper,” I wanted to make some quick and easy cards that featured that paper and not much more. To make these cards simple, I used

• only one color cardstock (Flirty Flamingo),
• the Designer Series Paper (DSP) (From My Heart Specialty),
• a Paper Trimmer,
• one stamp set (A Wish for Everything),
• one color of ink (Real Red), and
• adhesives.

Not only that, I limited my papers to one side of just four of the sheets in the DSP set. The papers from the DSP set that I used are:

• Pattern 1: Thin Stripes;
• Pattern 2: Scattered Arrows;
• Pattern 3: Small Hearts in even rows; and
• Pattern 4: Scattered hearts on a White background.

All four of the patterns are in the card above.

I chose the very versatile stamp set, “A Wish for Everything,” because it has one-word stamps that you can put together to make lots of sentiments. For these cards, I used the words, “Happy,” “Valentine’s,” and “Day.” I trimmed either end of the “Valentine’s” stamp so that the three stamps would fit nicely on one acrylic block (Block G). For the ink I used a Real Red Classic Stampin’ Pad.

This card also uses all four of the patterns of paper that I used. You can see that I left just enough room at the bottom of both cards to stamp my sentiment (and I did that BEFORE I adhered the papers “just in case.”

For my final card, I used only three of the patterns I’d chosen, and there is plenty of room at the bottom right of the card for the sentiment. Nonetheless, I stamped the sentiment first.

While Flirty Flamingo cardstock is light enough on which to write a note, I attached a piece of plain copy paper to the inside of my cards. Oh, and you’ll definitely have some scraps of your DSP left over. Use them to decorate the inside of your card!

Click Here for a sketch for each of the three cards. Once you’ve decided how many to make of each card, you’ll be able to figure out how to get as many strips and squares out of each sheet of DSP as possible. You’ll get a lot of cards out of the papers quickly! And if you have some little strips left over, you might consider using them on the inside. of the card for a little extra decoration.

Now on to visit Cheryl Hamilton’s Blog, Create With Cheryl. What fun to have all this Valentine’s Day creativity

Happy Stamping and Happy Valentine’s Day!