Valentine Shmalentine!

Valentine's Day is a non event in this house, passing by without a hint of heart or flower. For this reason I usually steer well clear of Valentine themed papers. However when I saw the Secret Crush Collection by Pink Paislee and the XOXO Collection by American Crafts I just knew I wanted to use them. I added in a few sheets of Studio Calico papers from various collections, to break up the 'pinkness' with a bit of blue and teal.
I also bought 3 rolls of decorative tape, choosing a couple of pink striped and black striped. This Stencil alphabet by Fancy Pants also caught my eye as did these element stickers by Pink Paislee.

The first LO I have to share is of my 3 boys in their Christmas outfits, I created 3 patterned paper pillars and placed them in the same height order as the boys are in the photo. The stark white of the card was taken away with a light mist of teal, and a few splatters of pink lemonade.

I hand cut 3 heart frames from pink patterned paper, edging with grey ink  for definition. I love that the decorative tapes are semi transparent so they can be layered over each other.

The little pink heart was cut from the heart patterned paper.

My second LO is very different as I concentrated mainly on the blues and greens, using the grey and pink papers minimally.

Here you can see that I used the black striped tape over the grey spotty paper... I love how this looks.

One of the cut off strips from a sheet of patterned paper had some very cute doodled arrows. My original plan was to cut out the arrows to use on my LO, but I decided to hand draw one around the cut out heart instead. The white gel pens from Ranger are perfect as they have a lovely opaque paint finish.
I punched the my dear element from patterned paper using a large scallop punch, and hand cut the speech bubbles to layer up.

On my last couple of LOs I decided to keep the stark white back ground and really try to embrace the 'pinkness'. I though I would find this really difficult scrapping boys, but I have to say I loved the final results.

On this LO of Drew and I, I created a strip of photos in Picasa choosing a black border. I kept the LO really simple, using just a couple of strips of paper to mat the photo strip, and using tapes to add further detail.

I like the white on white look, but in this case the title sticker became lost on the LO. I decided to stitch around it using 3 strands of embroidery floss. I poked the holes all the way around the title first, which made it a lot easier to sew.

A little bit of torn tape helped to ground the title so it wasn't just floating around at the top of the page.

You can see here, that I've overlapped two tapes again. With the huge amount of tapes available in the shop, the possibilities for this techniques are endless.

I used the bracket stickers to frame the last photo on the strip. You have to be really careful with these stickers as they are VERY sticky. once they're down they do not want to come back up!

In the top corner I used the American Crafts Knockout Border Punch System. This is a really clever way to have a number of punches that take up very little space

My final LO is my favourite. I took this photo of Harry to create his thank you cards for his birthday party. It's probably my favourite photo of him ever.

I inked the stencil monogram with grey ink and heat embossed with clear powder. This was then backed with the heart paper, and layered with tape, hand cut clouds, a sentiment cut from patterned paper and a sun sticker.

At the top of the page a cloud sticker was layered over a hand cut one.

A few hand cut hearts and some tiny sentiments were cut from the Pink Paislee collection papers and added under the photo.

 

I hope I have inspired you to look at Valentine themed papers with fresh eyes. You don't have to be a hopeless romantic to use them, and they are not just for scrapping photos of girls. Leave us a link to your work in the comments box so we can see how you have used the love themed collections.

Make sure you call back every few days to see what the rest of the team have created.