Cards for Charity: Valentines

My friend Pam's church is wanting Valentines now to sell for their very worthy charities, and I made 10 of these for them.

 Honestly, when I made the first one, I thought I would not be able to make 10; but I figured out a way to do it more easily. These are all die cuts, and the heart is a silhouette type die that cuts holes into your paper, and leaves all of these pieces to either use or throw away. I wanted to use the pieces only on these cards, and sticking them all down in the right place was the challenge.

When I was working at Art 'n Soul, I did a lot of demo'ing. One of the techniques people liked to see was one I called "stencil stamping." It's a type of mono printing using stencils. You can see a tutorial of that here, and if you search for stencil stamping on my blog, you will see lots of samples where I use it. Basically, I use a piece of watercolor cardstock and rub distress ink directly from the pad onto the paper. Then, I take a stencil and spray it with water mixed with Perfect Pearls powder, and press the stencil onto the inked paper. That leaves a print of the stencil onto the paper.

In order to use these backgrounds for the Valentines, I applied Stick-It adhesive to the backs of each panel. I was able to get two sentiments and two hearts out of each panel, so I only needed 5 panels, and I had enough left over from my demos, in blue and pink and purple and pink.

After running it through the die cut machine, I left the paper in the die and turned it over. I removed the release paper from the backs of each of the individual pieces. I then turned it over onto a piece of white cardstock, and pressed a tool through each of the holes in the die to make sure the pieces would come out of the die and stick to the cardstock. I took off the die and rubbed my fingers over the entire piece to be sure the pieces would stay stuck down. 

After doing this several times, it got easier, and I got them all done in one night. Of course I die cut the panels with my favorite Crimped Frame die, and I matted each panel with pink cardstock.

I cut out the negatives of these and plan to make more cards from them. They still have the Stick It adhesive on the backs, so it should be easy to do something nice with them.

Products Used:

Simon Says Stamp S412 Corbel Heart die

Mama Elephant Happy Valentine's Day die

Distress Inks: Picked Raspberry, Peacock Feathers,

Wilted Violet

Perfect Pearls Pearl Powder

Tim Holtz Watercolor cardstock

Stick-It Adhesive

Stencil used on these is no longer in production, but you

can use any stencil that has about equal amounts of open area to solid

So Silk Beauty Pink cardstock