Simple Valentine heart

I’d been working my way through the handful of cards that had to be made — finished two birthday cards, almost finished a wedding card, and still looking for inspiration for a Valentine card — when I came down with Covid. We’ve managed to avoid it completely for three years, but then my other half picked up what we thought was a cold and I developed a fever a few days later. I’ve had a course of Paxlovid which seems to have stopped the Covid, but I am still utterly wiped out.

But I couldn’t not make a Valentine card.

I started out by making a heart stencil with some dies and a piece of Dura-lar, and used that to ink hearts over a piece of glossy paper with Distress oxides. I wasn’t very happy with how it was looking, but I persevered, adding more bits until I had to admit that nothing was going to make me like it and I scrapped it. It’s rare that I do that, but there’s a difference between “I don’t like it the way it is” and “I’m never going to like it.”

Looking around my desk I spotted some gilded hearts. I had played around with adding gilding flakes to these scribbled heart die-cuts when I was trying out ideas for the wedding card. That’s when, encouraged by my flagging energy levels, I decided that I would keep it super simple and make a minimalist, clean-and-simple card. A pearlised card base, a gilded heart and a simple sentiment.

Even though I actually like the end result, part of me rebels at making something so simple, but the rest of me recognises that I had neither the brain power nor energy to come up with anything else.