For My Valentine

Our Wednesday snow-in was quite productive as Whitney and I Skyped about a bunch of different design ideas. Aside from the fact that we like to come up with new product on a regular basis, we've also come to really enjoy the weekly challenges that are hosted by a number of different companies and bloggers out there. In fact, as I've said before, they've really become our go-to places for design inspiration. It's nice to have at least half of the guesswork out of the way, YKWIM?

It's now become a challenge to us to see just how many birds we can kill with one stone. *snicker* Today, we're knocking out not one, not two, not three, but FOUR challenges with ONE card! Can you say KA-CHING?!

You may find this surprising, but until this week, I had not made my hubby's Valentine. *gasp* I know! So given that we would be incorporating love into the card (in order to meet a challenge), it seemed like the perfect opportunity to get his card knocked out!

Actually, two challenges lent themselves to a Valentine:  Papercrafts Simple Sentiments Challenge and the Lawnscaping All About Love Challenge. Having the overall theme and some elements in mind, we began the card design by selecting a layout, which is based on this week's sketch over at My Favorite Things. Now we needed a color scheme. Knowing that this Valentine is going to my husband, I needed the color scheme to be a bit more on the masculine side. After much searching through this week's myriad of color challenges, we settled on the Embellish Color Trends Challenge with Hearts. How fitting - not only does the color scheme fit the bill, it includes hearts as well!

Now it's time to get started on construction. I started with an artichoke base, leaving a narrow border of the white card base exposed. And I had the perfect pink polka dot in the stash for the vertical panel. I opted for ribbon rather than paper for the horizontal strip across the middle. For extra color dimension, I went with a shade of artichoke that was a tad darker than my cardstock, but that wasn't quite enough. It still needed something. Plus, it still left me without the minty greenish color. So I dug through the ribbon stash again and found this lovely scalloped jewel that was perfect. We were thrilled to discover that one of the simple sentiments downloaded from Papercrafts was a good fit for the shaped panel in the sketch. Since the original sentiment was completely in grayscale, I pulled it into PS Elements & added some color to a few of the elements. This helped pull in one of the tough colors (for me anyway): the red. I opted to print the image on photo paper for a little extra pop and then cut it out & popped it up. To meet the hearts requirement for the Embellish challenge, I dug through our button stash and found several hearts. And whaddya know ... they were the perfect shade of PINK to boot! I also found the perfect color red, though I didn't want it to be a predominant color so I stuck to just one round red button. I threaded all of the buttons b/c they just didn't look right nekked (to borrow from Julie Ebersole). With all of the buttons in place, it just didn't feel right. So I opted to break up the threesome in opposing corners and fill in with some smaller elements - pearls!

When it was all said and done, I was quite pleased with this little card. Not only did it meet the challenges, it also met my own personal goal - the perfect masculine Valentine for the hubby.

Thanks for stopping in today! I'm off to enjoy some quality time with my sweetie.