Valentines with Verve & MME.

Happy Monday, Girls!

I hope you all had a super weekend and are happily entering a new week.

Today I've got a fun little card that I made in the 1/2 hour I had between dinner and American Idol last Wednesday night. It would have been less than that, but I had to take pictures to share with you all. Who doesn't love eye candy? Well, if you hate it, just smile and nod, would ya'? *wink*

This was the day that my new Verve stamps got here. So I knew from the outset that I was making a card with one of these new stamps. But I have to show you the fancy-schmancy packaging Miss Julee does with your Verve stamps. Stamps come wrapped in this pretty light turquoise tissue paper with sparklies, and the invoice is pretty too - nice heavy linen paper with all the pretty coordinating Verveness on it.

And did you know that you always get a free stamp with your order? What a generous bonus. It's the first thing I look for in my package - the stamp that says "thanks for your order!" And it's always a cute simple sentiment - and who can't use more of those?

So I chose the stamp I wanted to work with and put the rest of the package aside. Because I don't color images, I buy most of the Plain Janes which are these great little sentiment stamps for $3 each.

I gave Love Me Do so much love the week before last, I totally forgot about Be Loved. So today's card again features patterned papers by My Mind's Eye.

Because I was on limited time, I didn't want to be cutting and thinking too hard, so I decided to use a piece from the packaging as my main patterned paper piece.

I thought it might be cute to have the sentiment sort of sticking up behind the patterned paper, so I pulled out this great little pack of Anna Griffin Valentine journaling cards that I picked up at Archiver's. I don't scrapbook, but I think these journaling cards are great for creating sentiment panels.

I flipped through to find the one that would match the best - cream, brown and a little bit of pink. And then I set my stamp on top of it to make sure it would fit OK.

Since this was my first time stamping with this stamp, I did one stamp on some paper, and then stamped on to my journaling card. Some clear stamps that I get I have to stamp and smoosh and do several things to them at the outset to get a clean image. With Verve stamps, I typically just have to do one and I'm good to go.

I adhered my sentiment panel first and then popped up the patterned paper piece with some dimensionals.

I punched a heart out of some of the coordinating patterned paper and that didn't stand out enough, so I used one of the diecuts from the paper pack and popped it up with a dimensional over the heart.

I wrapped some red crochet thread around the top of my card, stood it up on my dusty Big Shot *giggles* and just stared at it to think about how to finish it off.

I punched a heart border on to a strip of coordinating patterned paper, added some lace trim from A Million Memories, a little Fancy Pants heart pin, and topped it off with a Dew Drop and I was happy and on the couch in time to hear Ryan Seacrest say "THIS is American Idol."

Be sure and hop back by at 3pm my time today for my Papertrey Ink Blog Hop project - it's fabby...and with more pictures *wink*

See you soon!