... and Paint Swatch Valentine's Cards

YAY! Its Valentine's Day soon! Those who know me well know there's a hint of sarcasm in that exclamation, mostly because although the sentiment of giving a loved one a token of your love is well, lovely(!)... I do not get the whole commercial aspect of it. Especially when times are hard. However, you've got to give a card so... following on from our Paint Swatch Christmas Cards, I thought I'd try some Valentine's cards.

I started sketching some ideas out and couldn't decide on which one to go with. I decided to share both!!

The first one is as simple as it looks:

• I cut the middle 4 pieces of a 6 piece paint swatch ("Red Stallion"), and trimmed off the white bits and the writing. 
• After drawing them on (freehand - but you could make a template from printed text if you wanted) I cut out the letters "L", "V" and "E" out of an off-white paint swatch ("Chiffon Silk") and stuck them on with sticky pads for a raised effect. The "O" is of course, a button! I stitched this on with pink embroidery thread. 
• Stick the strip onto a blank white card with more sticky pads, and you are done!

This next one is a bit more time consuming but I had a lot of fun with it:

• The tree is an image from Google images. I adjusted the size so it would fit the same style of blank card and printed it off. (Hilariously I appear to have not saved it to show here... but of course there are lots of trees out there in Google world!!).  
• I pierced through the image's outline onto the card in order to stitch through the holes. I make a lot of stitched cards and these are my must have tools: Paper Piercer (I have 5 different ones for different sizes of holes and combinations , Needle Threading Tool (usually you need at least three strands of embroidery floss for the stitches to "pop",  Snippers (have I made that up?!) or Little Scissors, and something to lean on. I use a piece of Mount-Board (MUCH cheaper than a "proper" piercing mat!)

• Using the pierced holes, I backstitched onto the card using dark brown embroidery thread (securing the ends to the back with tape - no need to tie nots here!!). 
• The hearts are punched out of various shades of pink and red paint swatches. They were then glued on with differing amounts of Pinflair for a 3D effect.

But there's more: Mally's card! Obviously I like this the best! He chose the colours himself with no thought to how they would interact, but its all good!! I am not (that much of) a control freak ...

These were done with a bigger heart punch and a glue stick, as well as some of my leftover little hearts from the tree card. Couldn't be more simple!!!!

So there you have three different styles. There are so many more possibilities though - hope you are inspired and Happy Valentine's Day for the 14th xxx