Crafty Meadows: Welcome to the Joyful Stars Blog Hop for January

One of the things I wanted to share with you is a simple project I created for the clients where I work. I work 2 days a week as a bookkeeper for a non-profit organization that works with adults with disabilities. The clients have varying abilities and challenges but they are a joy to everyone at work. The staff is wonderful and they treat the clients with respect and great care.

As with any long time paper crafter I have an over abundance of supplies so why not share them with others,

I thought they would enjoy seeing/using the Cricut Expression to cut the components of a Valentines card and then put them together and decorate them. I will have a variety of valentine sentiments they can add to the inside of the card. I will also give them the choice of using some pattern paper as the front of the card or to do some random stamping to create their own pattern.

I used the CTMH Artiste Cricut cartridge to cut the heart card (shift, accent 2) on page 72, For the outside of the card I used Ruby cardstock and was cut at 4.5 and for the inside I used White Daisy cut it at 4.4 from White Daisy cardstock.

I have always liked the look of tone-on-tone stamping so I used Ruby ink and the little rose stamp from the stamp set included in the Heartstrings card workshop to randomly stamp the front of the card. If you like a more muted look you can use second generation stamping (ink up, stamp once on scrap paper and then stamp on final project). Random stamping is most appealing to the eye if you actually start with a triangular pattern and then continue that triangular pattern on the entire project and make sure to stamp partially off the project to stick to the pattern. You will see on the completed project that my random stamping is not perfect.

The white heart on the front of the card was also cut from the CTMH Artiste cartridge, (page 72, accent 3, 3 inches) from White Daisy, I then stamped it with the Happy Valentine's day stamp also from the Heartstrings workshop. There are at least 2 other "Happy Valentine's day" stamps in our current catalog (D1560 Holiday Tags, or S1504 April Stamp of the month) you could choose.

For the inside of the card I chose "Always be your own kind of Wonderful" stamp from D1627 stamp set of the same name.

I absolutely love the Heartstrings Card Workshop from our Seasonal Expressions catalog and will make the stamps available to the clients for their cards. I will post the samples of the actually cards from the Workshop in my next post.

This is how my dog was sleeping while I was crafting. Yes - she does have all 4 legs, her back ones are tucked up under her and her two front legs on are the arm rest.