Created with Love

This year, my Valentines Day cards for dh and dd were inspired by a birthday card I ran across while browsing the Hallmark card aisle at the drug store.

In fact, I was so amazed with this card, I had to buy it just so I could take it home to figure out how it was put together and make one too. The concept of the design on this card is actually the same as a simple pop-up card, with the pop-up element cut at different lengths resulting in a tiered card. Very ingenious, Hallmark!

For my cards, I used the Mickey Font cart and welded the letters in Design Studio to the tops of the layers for the Happy Valentines Day greeting. The photo below of the side view of the card shows how the pop-up element separates the tiers when the card is open.

On the card for dd and her bf, I used cuts from Aladdin on the Dreams Come True cartridge. In order to get the "head shots" large enough, I had to do a 12 inch cut of Aladdin and Jasmine and cut away their legs. Choosing to do a larger cut also made piecing together the face details much easier to do. The filigree heart is from the Wedding cart.

The cloud on the front of the card is from the Paper Pups cart. The sentiment was printed on vellum, attached to the cloud outline and attached with foam mounting tape. The floral embossing on the front was done with a Cuttlebug strip embossing folder and the lacy corners were punched with a corner punch from All Night Media.

My card for dh uses the same base card as for the first card; I just changed the colors and theme. The knight, princess, castle and dragon cuts are all from the Paper Dolls cartridge. The filigree heart on this card is a Sizzix Bigz die.

Making little Valentine treats is always so much fun. The cutfile for these cute gable boxes was created and shared on the Cricut Messageboard by member Robin Savage.

Thank you, Robin! You can contact her via the Cricut Messageboard to request a copy of her cutfile. I added heart cut outs to the fronts of the boxes so the yummy Dove chocolates could peek out. Finally had the chance to use my new Hello Kitty and Sesame Street cartridges! Glittered, printed cardstock for these boxes are from DCWV.

Also had the chance to make these designer or boxy bags that I've been wanting to make forever. Cambria Turnbow has a very good tutorial for them on her blog, "Stamp A Little Love, Baby". Found these bags to be really quick and simple. But didn't realize till I actually made one, how small these are. The bottom of this is 2-1/2 inches square. I needed it to be bigger to hold bags of puffed rice candy I had bought, and changing the sizes on these was very easy. I increased the size of the box on the bottom to be 3 x 4-1/2 inches. The only problem with the larger sized bags is that it takes more than 12 inches of paper to go around the bag. I ended up having to add an additional 4 inches of paper . Next time I think I'll consider using a heavy weight wrapping paper if I need a larger sized bag.

Decorated the small bags with Hello Kitty cuts and the larger bags with the Sizzix filigree heart cuts. Scalloped border on the bottom and the tab punch (since I don't own this SU punch...) for the bag closure were created with the George cart in Design Studio.

Here's a photo of the re-sized, larger designer bag and more decorated cable boxes. The height of these larger bags is 8-1/2 inches.

These are few of the tags I made....

Nestabilities for the scalloped rectangle and circle, Sizzlits die cuts for the red tag and Hello Kitty cartridge for the round tag.

This one's from the doggie...

Nestablilites for the scalloped square and Quickutz for the doggy. (Love how this die cut looks so much like our own little Latte!) Sentiment is from a dollar set of clear stamps by g studio.

One more gift card for dd, with another Cricut Hello Kitty cut. Stamped sentiment in the heart is from Dandelion Designs and embossed scalloped edge was done with a Cuttlebug embossing strip. Stamped circle sentiment on the envelope is from Autumn Leaves.

And I even had time (barely!) to bake up some lemon custard filled cupcakes, topped with lemon buttercream (thanks, Heather!)

Lastly, I sent out cards created on Hallmark.com from our fur baby with this photo. Poor thing...she doesn't look too happy, does she?

Not sure which she hated more...the ribbons on her ears or being stuffed into that little bucket...probably the latter!