WHEN VALENTINES ARE NOT VALENTINES

Last year Stampin' Up came out with a new Valentine set called Happy Heart Day. I normally don't do special holiday cards except for Christmas, but I thought I should have at least one valentine set in my stamp collection so I ordered it. I did use it to make a couple of Valentine cards for family members, but it hasn't been out of its box since last February. I know that is really sad....With February coming on strong and fast I decided to pull it back out of the closet and see what I could do with it.

There was a challenge on SCS, I forget which one since I haven't gone back and uploaded to it yet, to use hearts on your card. I guess that's why I thought of this set. But I didn't want to do a Valentine card. I'm barely out of the Christmas mind set....I'm not even ready to consider that Valentine's Day is coming in less than a month. I also knew I wanted to kill two challenges with one card and I pulled out the striped designer paper to use from my winter craft kit.

My little mousie friend was holding his heart and I used a heart punch to create some interest along the bottom edge of the card. So those were my hearts. The strip DP had red in it and I wanted my punched out hearts to be red so I placed a red strip of paper under neath them. I then pulled in the blue from the striped DP in to the scalloped ovals. I just felt another color was needed to liven things up.

Going back a moment to the hearts and the red strip of card stock. The scalloped edge under the hearts make the top of the card quite a bit shorter than the back of the card. The card won't stand up because of this, but I don't really care about that. The red is adhered to the inside of the of the card. If I had wanted to design the card so it would stand I could have adhered the red to the back of the card front making the front the same length as the card back.

Looking at the outside of the card alone I guess it could be a Valentine card. BUT.......when you open it up you discover a big birthday wish! You can also see that by adhering the red to the inside of the card rather than the front I could add some more interest with another scalloped edge.

So this is my Valentine card that is not a Valentine. I still have a couple of weeks before I need to start thinking hearts and flowers of February. I do think this might just be a birthday card for someone who has a birthday around February 14, and I know more than one person who does............