I hope you had a wonderful Valentine’s Day!  My day was like pretty much everyday except my hubby was super sweet and let me sleep in a little in the morning.  He even fed Nicholas breakfast while I slept!  That was an awesome enough gift for me.

Well, as evidenced by my just getting my Christmas thank you cards out in the mail last week, I’m a bit behind on my holiday card making.  So, it really wasn’t any surprise that I didn’t get many Valentines done…and by many I mean, I got one done.  Sure, I helped my son make one for his daddy, and so I hurried to put together one from me as well.

I saw a card on the Stampin’ Up! facebook page that used this stamp from the Easy Events stamp set in front of the lattice embossed background and it was inspiration enough to get me started.

I was trying to figure out how I wanted to mat the image when I remembered that I had just received the Designer Frames embossing folders as a free Sale-a-Bration item and sure enough, the rectangle frame was a perfect fit!

The really cool thing about these embossing folders is that since the plastic is somewhat see-through, I could stamp my image first and then line it up inside the frame before embossing.  Sure, it leaves a little bit of ink on the folder, but that is easy to clean with a little spritz of the Stampin’ Mist cleaner.

Anyway, after embossing the image, I decided to snazzy it up a bit and used a black marker to outline the embossed ridge near the inside of the rectangle.  Then I cut out the whole frame and sponged to make it “pop” more off the background.

Oh, and one tip I’ll give you about watercoloring your images:
Let the ink sit for an extra minute before you start blending your colors.

I used a blender pen, and though I know the Basic Black ink is water resistant and that classic ink dries really quickly.  I forgot that if you are going to be doing a lot of pulling the color around with a blender pen – let your stamped image sit for an extra minute to totally dry.  I started coloring in almost immediately after stamping and found that if I went over the black lines very much with the blender pen it would darken my color (in this case, I ran into it with the green of the tree).  It still looked pretty and came out fine, but I ended up stamping again anyway because I wanted a more vibrant color when I was coloring.  Letting the image sit while I cut out the frame was more than enough time to be ready to color.

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Easy Events Love Card Recipe:
Stamps:  Easy Events
Ink:  Lucky Limeade Classic Ink, Cherry Cobbler Classic, Soft Suede Classic, Basic Black marker
Paper: Basic Black CS, Whisper White CS
Accessories:  Big Shot, Designer Frames Embossing folder, Cherry Cobbler seam binding ribbon, Basic Black 1/4” grosgrain ribbon, Stampin’ Dimensionals, Lattice embossing folder