Not Quite for the Holidays Anymore!

At times I really enjoy making fancy cards, but sometimes I just want something relatively clean and simple that is quick and easy to make, where the image gets the focus and there's no fuss! That's what today's card is. Very often for cards like this I will use a familiar simple layout too...in this instance I based my card loosely on SCS SC186.

Kate at i {heart} papers challenged our design team to use some Christmas designer paper to make a birthday or Valentine's Day card. I bought a lot of the different Wassail prints back in December and have quite a few scraps left. I thought this Winterberry print would work perfectly for this challenge so long as I kept the scale small enough to cover up the snowflakes. What do you think?! Did I pull it off successfully?

I love this potted hearts plant from the Hero Arts set, Many Hearts. It is a great Valentine image that works well for every-day too. I stamped it in Palette Noir ink on the solid side of a scrap of Snowdust paper, then colored it using prismas and baby oil. I have a 42-color set and had to layer in the colors to get the green I wanted. A band of May Arts ribbon covered up those Christmas snowflakes, and I laid in a few red Kaiser pearls to dress up the corners of the mat, cut from the flip side of the Winterberry.

It was actually kinda fun to use Christmas colors in the hopes that this card would not look like Christmas at all! I'm dedicating this card to my brother Jerry whose birthday is December 22, and to all of the other close-to-a-holiday birthday babies whose celebrations get lost in the shuffle, including my fellow ihp DT mates Cathleen (Christmas Day!) and Kendra (New Year's Eve!)!

Kate just started running some i {heart} papers ads over at Split Coast Stampers, so keep an eye out for them. Be sure to take advantage of the 10% off sale happening all weekend long! You have to spy the ad to grab the discount code, which is valid through Sunday. Have fun!