Craft Day: Valentine's Day cards

Well, I must admit I'm shocked that Brook and I have been able to pull off two, that's right, TWO craft days! It's all very exciting, and I'm hoping we can continue gathering once a month to create and chat. For February we decided it would be nice to make Valentine's day cards. Brook found this lovely little tutorial over at Martha Stewart Living. It entailed printing rose-like shapes with the cut end of lettuce heads and celery stalks - simple yet lovely. So we dug out the inks, colorful cards, and decorative paper and started stamping. It turned out to be a lot of fun, and even the skeptic in the bunch got excited about the project (yay!) when she realized we were using block printing ink (not just stamp pads).

Although the veggie stamps played an important role in our card creations, many of us ended up rolling the ink directly onto the card which created some amazing patterns and textures. I showed everyone how to do a rainbow roll (rolling out two separate inks then merging the colors together in the center to create a third color), which resulted in some really lovely designs. Everyone was super creative.

As I look over the photos I took using the Hipstamatic app on my iPhone, I'm realizing I didn't really capture the amazing patterns that everyone created. Evidently I was in artsy-hipstamatic mode instead of document-it-accurately mode. So forgive me ladies for not representing your work properly here! Never-the-less, I think the photos show the basics which I hope is helpful. There's still time to create a few valentine cards using this method, so get stamping and share the love!