Ring in the New Year with LOVE

Hello everyone, and HAPPY NEW YEAR!!!  I hope all of you enjoyed a season of abundant joy and many blessings.  I know I did.  And now I'm ready to get back to the fun of creating.

I am so honored to have the first card of 2012 posted in the Card A Day Blog .  Our first theme of the year is Valentine's Day.  I had a few goals in mind when I started designing my card:  I wanted to use my Cricut; I wanted to create a shaped card; and I wanted my card to be sized for a #10 envelope instead of my so very typical standard A2 size (5 1/2 x 4 1/4).  With those goals in mind, and considering the subject, I determined that I would use the heart shape, but in multiples.  What I came up with is three stacked and layered hearts.  I'll show them to you one at a time from the top.

You can see in the photo that I started with a white, and inked, card base.  The layered heart was cut in red card, embossed on my Cuttlebug, and inked with white and red to show the texture.  The sentiment was cut from gold card, stamped and heat embossed with opaque white, inked just a bit and embellished with red jewels.  It was affixed with foam tape.

The middle heart was cut from a lovely silver glitter paper.  I decided to let the paper speak for itself, so it has no further embellishment other than a bit of red inking around the edges.  The glittery heart is affixed with foam tape to raise it just a bit from the top and bottom hearts.

My bottom heart was cut from the same pretty gold card stock as the top sentiment piece.  It's embellished with a stamped and heat embossed floral image enhanced with red jewels, as well as a smaller embossed heart cut from the same red card as the uppermost heart.  This small heart is also affixed with foam tape for extra dimension.  The white embossing of the floral image, as well as the sentiment, looked a little stark, so I softened it a bit with the red ink.

Because the card front has so many elements, I decided to leave the inside very plain except for a pretty sentiment which I stamped in red.

This stacked heart card base was created using a heart image from the Accent Essentials Cricut Cartridge on my Gypsy.  I took the simple heart image, duplicated it, stacked and then welded the three shapes.  I placed the folded card stock on the cutting mat so that the left side would not be cut.  I used a blade depth of 5 and repeated the cut twice to be sure both layers would be cut through.  For the layered hearts, I used the same heart image, but made it just a bit smaller than the size used for the base, and cut it from the three separate papers.  Here is the full front view, as well as an angled view to better show the dimension:

I do hope you've enjoyed your visit with me today.  I wish you many wonderfully creative times during the coming year, and hope that you and your family enjoy good health, happiness and lots of love.

Always keep your creative genius happy and well-fed!

CHRISTINE