Tart and Tangy – Chocolate Covered Strawberries

Hi Everyone

Happy Valentine Night.  Tonight's card uses Tart and Tangy and was the second of the Valentine's I made for Lou.  Strawberries are a big deal for us.. it's a long story!  So, this was the perfect card. I had made another strawberry Valentine and Beth – welcome back Beth… so glad that your Dad is on the mend! – had suggested using chocolate.  It was a great suggestion and I kept that in the back of my mind for my Valentine card.

So, this one is for my darling Lou!

I used the sketch from the splitcoaststampers challenge number 267 this week.  The only change I made to the sketch was to turn it horizontal instead of vertical.  Now…. I might tell you that this card took me for ever to get right.  I first had it on a real red background with the vanilla and polka dot paper from the scrapping kit – Christmas Jingle.  I didn't like that… I then took the polka dot off… I still didn't like that.  I then couldn't make up my mind which color to use for the matt.  I had olive and red.  I had red and brown.  here's what my space looked like at one stage.  The mess on my cutting pad reflected the complete mess that was going on in my little brain!  What you don't see is the rest of the mess I created on the other side of my Mac!

As you can see, my punch got a lot of use yesterday!

Here's what the strawberries looked like with Real Red and Old Olive

OK… so discard that… lets try Real Red and Chocolate Chip

I played around like this for about 20 minutes!!! No kidding.  Finally a brain wave…..

Ah!  Ah! I can now make this clean and simple and get the effect I wanted….  Finalmente! as the Italian's would say!

Now… it looks like chocolate covered strawberries with Vanilla Ice Cream!  After my ah! ah! moment, I couldn't work out why I hadn't thought of this in the beginning.  I let the sketch lead me down the path of using DSP when I really didn't need to.  I added interest to the back of the strawberries by using textured paper for the matts and then running the Vanilla matt through my Big Shot with the Polka Dot folder- although you can't see it on this picture, I really did run it through the big shot!!  You can almost see the dots a little better on the top of the matt – top right hand corner.  I wanted them to mimic the dots in the strawberries…. here's a closeup for you.

Card recipe – FINAL card recipe….. 🙂

• Very Vanilla and Real Red card stock
• Tart and Tangy stamp set (111514), "love you" from the Short and Sweet sentiment (115060)
• Stampin' Up! Perfect Polka Dots Embossing Folder from the new mini – (117335)
• Real Red, Old Olive and Chocolate Chip markers
• Clear embossing powder

I inked up the stamp using my markers.  The leaves in Old Olive and the strawberry in Real Red at the top and Chocolate Chip on the bottom.  I then cut around them with my paper snips and stamped my Versamark pad over them.  I left enough white space to be able to hold the paper.  I dipped them into the embossing powder and then used my heat gun to set the embossing powder.  I then cut around them with my paper snips and set them on top of their matts with stampin dimensionals.

I used my Stamp-a-Ma-Jig to ensure perfect placement of the sentiment.

I also used my Perfect Layers tool to create my matts.

So… tonight is the big night….. Tonight is the night that the winners get drawn – by my able four-pawed and handsome assistant Bilbo Baggins.  Two winners will be drawn tonight. The winner of the blog candy comment draw…… and…. the winner of the BIG SHOT – or equivalent value in SU! product provided by yours truly.  Several of you participated in my card drive – and I am so grateful to those of you who did.

So, Adelle, Cam, Beth, Lynn, Hazel, Kelli and Yvonne – you are all in the draw for tonight.  I am so excited to do the draw… but even more so, am so excited that we collected so many cards for hugsandhope and fromourhearts.

Don't forget to check back tomorrow for the two draws!

Hugs

Jaydee