Heart card with beautiful paper and a layered heart accent over beautiful ribbon

I made this card for DH for Valentine's!  We are cooking at home - chicken picatta and lemon spaghetti with salad and steamed asparagus!!! It will be great and we have chocolate lava cakes for dessert.  

I have had this piece of paper for quite a while.  I have been saving it for a project worthy of its beauty.  I decided the time had finally come!!  I created a large yellow green card to fit in an envelope in my stash.  I added a length of this beautiful soft ribbon to the paper before adhering it to my card front.  It is very shimmery in very deep luscious colours.  For my heart embellishement I started with the collaged heart - colourful tissue paper hearts collaged with sparkly white glue onto white tissue paper which I made up when I was doing up my tribute to front line workers last year.  I cut it out by hand using the same pattern I used for my book of colours for my youngest grand daughter.  I layered it onto some gold cardstock and trimmed it with scallop decorative scissors.  It was feeling a little naked so I checked my little stash of hearts and found this red and gold one that worked perfectly to fix that little problem.  To finish off my card I tied a short length of the same ribbon to the length on my card to simulate and bow and add my heart with 3D foam tape.   We need to celebrate all the loves in our lives!!!!!   Therese 
 

All occasion cards with a punched frame and silk flower embellishements

 I had a few extra card kits the other day when I was making these for my friend.  I decided to just make them up and add them to my stash of cards.  They have a punched frame which is embellished with layered silk flowers.  It was really interesting to make the punched frames which I have not done in quite a long time and my selection of punches has grown since.  I did have to play a bit with the size of the squares to get them to have space on the corners but generally 2.75" works well.  Some of my punches do not have a gap  - they punch right on the edge of the paper - so they did not work with this technique.  I embossed a strip of cardstock and slid into the punched slots which made the frame positionable which was kind of fun.  Therese

Joyful Hearts book of colours

I have been playing with fabric in order to create a little book of hearts for my youngest grand daughter.  It was created to help her learn her colours.  I created two rectangles using neutral colours - black, grey, brown and white.  I cut four rectangles about 11" x 5.5" - one of each colour.  That configuration gave me eight pages to work with so I went with the basic rainbow of colours - blue, green, yellow, orange, red and purple.  I created a little colourful patchwork for the front.  I cut a template from paper and traced it on the back and cut it out.  I chose fabrics from my stash for all the other colours as well and cut hearts from them as well.  I laid out the pages and then added the hearts in order of  the rainbow which also reflects colour theory in that blue and yellow make green, etc.  I used coordinating thread and a zigzag stitch to attach the hearts to the pages.  Next, I stitched the pages fronts together - black to gray and brown to white leaving a gap to turn them inside out.  Once pressed I used coordinating thread to add a double row of stitching to the edges.  Next, I did some all over stitching to more firmly attach the fabric to each other which stiffened the pages a bit.  

Unfortunately, I failed to properly position all of my hearts back to back on my pages so when I did my all over quilting I ended up stitching over some of my hearts.  A bit of a bummer but I had not anticipated the problem so I did not plan for it.  I will do better next time.  Fortunately, it was on only two of the hearts - the blue and the orange and I was able to camouflage the error with a Sharpie markers in the right colours.  Youc can see below how I coloured the light thread with  blue where it ran over the edge of the heart.  The back page has a pink heart.   I laid my two pages over each other and ran a row of zig zag stitches down the middle to create the spine.  The hearts seemed a bit flat so I handstitched a heart on all the colour pages with coordinating embroider floss.  I had to be careful not to stitch too deep which was not too difficult.  

I am really happy with how it worked out and I hope she will enjoy playing with it.  She is a year old and taking her first steps!!  Therese