Valentine's Week at Everyday Cricut

I was honored to be asked by Joy and Melanie to be the Guest Designer this week on their popular blog Everyday Cricut.  They are sponsored by ProvoCraft and give away a Cricut cartridge every week.  This week it is the Country Life cartridge. If this is your first time to visit my blog, welcome!  I hope you will enjoy it and follow or subscribe so you can keep up to date with my projects and tutorials.

I was a Guest Designer on Everyday Cricut once before (from March 8 - 12, 2010) and I will be doing a similar style of posting with a project on the Everyday Cricut blog and a "companion post" here on my blog.  You'll want to be sure to visit the Everyday Cricut blog and leave a comment for a chance to win the cartridge. 

For today's posts I made a couple of cards.  I cut some slightly different materials with my Cricut.  The card above is the one featured on the Everyday Cricut blog and I used fuzzy contact paper for the heart and the sentiment.  You can read all about it HERE.

After Christmas sales are a great time to pick up materials for next year's projects.  Sometimes you find things that can be used even sooner.  There is always a lot of red and green for Christmas and you can often use the red items for Valentine's Day and the green for St. Patrick's Day.  (I used to do this with the leftover Christmas candy assortment of M and Ms!).  I found some beautiful Anna Griffin items on clearance at Michael's and the red and white border in this package caught my eye.

I thought the design would be lovely for a Valentine's Day card.  The strip was twelve inches and when I cut it into two sections of three squares and set aside the partial squares on the ends I had pieces that were just under 5 1/4 inches long and perfect for A2 cards.

This was my "first draft" of the card.  I used an ivory cardstock base and found some "Ruby Red" Stampin' Up cardstock that was a near perfect match for the patterned strip for the layer.  The layer is cut at 4 x 5 1/4 inches.

I wanted to add some texture to the layer and I remembered that the "Love Language" Cuttlebug A2 Combo Set has a folder with tiny hearts.  Unfortunately the hearts are designed to emboss on a vertical card front, however, it was easy to make the folder work for a horizontal card.  First I carefully lined up the hearts on the left side of the cardstock and embossed the left side.

Then I inserted the embossed cardstock in the folder with the last row of hearts overlapping and ran it through the Cuttlebug again.  The A2 folder will fit through in this direction easily.

After these two steps, I ended up with a nicely embossed horizontal card layer.

I found this lovely "Happy Valentine's Day" sentiment on the Martha Stewart Crafts Seasonal Cake Art cartridge.  I cut it at 1 1/2 inches to fit the card comfortably.

I decided the card needed some more sparkle, so I used DCWV Glitter cardstock for the sentiment.  This particular gold is from the Holiday Collection Mat Stack in 2009.  Many glitter cardstocks will cut well in the Cricut.  It is best to find the ones that have the glitter embedded or under a glaze.  If you try to cut a rough glitter cardstock (the kind you can run your hand across and remove some of the glitter) it can get very messy and the loose bits could get into places they shouldn't and interfere with your machine.

 For this cardstock I used blade depth of 6, pressure at 4 (high) and did a 2 times multi-cut.  Multi-cut is almost always the answer if you are having trouble with cuts snagging.  You can reduce the pressure just a bit and when the cut is made twice any places that were not cleanly cut the first time are usually fine after a second cutting.  I use this Creative Memories Multi Purpose Tool to lift the cuts and help to separate the waste sections.

I liked the old fashioned look of the border strip and I decided to add one of the Red Vintage Poppies from Creative Charms at the top of the card.  I replaced the pearl brad with a gold one from the 3D Vintage Brads - Antique Flower Medley.

Here is a close view of the brad in the poppy.

I decided to add a red Gradient Gem Sticker in the smallest size and darkest shade of red to give it a bit of spark.

I used a large 3D Glue Dot to attach the poppy to the card.

I added two more medium size gem stickers to the centers of the other two designs in the border strip.  This was my final card - but then I remembered some tiny cherubs that I found at a local antique shop.  I knew one of them would add a little touch of nostalgia to the card.

The cherub is a charm but I slipped the loop under the border and it is hidden.

Here is my final card - don't forget to check and see what you can find in the Christmas clearance that might work with your other seasonal projects.

Tomorrow I'll be bringing you something sweet - I hope you like it!

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