So, my wife and I exchange hand-made valentines as our tradition. For the past three years, she’s given me a mosaic piece that are all tied together through an encrypted message that I have yet to figure out. It’s like “Happy V-day…dummy!” :) Anyway, because she’s making the final of these connected valentine mosaics, and mosaics are big projects, she’s way behind. So we haven’t done our exchange yet. So I’m still fiddling away at elements of my gift to her. Today, I made a copper valentine. It’s about three inches across. I cut it out of thin copper sheet with tin snips, rubbed a texture into it using a form below and a sharpened dowel above, rubbed ink in, dried it, and then adhered UTEE (plastic granules) with Versamark ink pad to the raised bits of the texture and melted the UTEE with my heat gun. Once that was done, I rubbed bright-pink colored mica dust into the raised plastic design. The idea was that it would fall to the low areas, but it did the opposite and stuck to the plastic parts. Then I remelted it to set the color/texture combination. Oh, and I punched holes for later application before I started coloring. I was rushed, but I quite like it.
Posted a day late so as not to ruin the surprise… I made a valentine for my valentine, including a card and a heart shaped cherry cake. Cherries was actually the theme of the day as maraschino cherries are one of his favorites.
Grasping at straws to stay in the thing-a-day game, I have to submit this blog post that I wrote to my mom thanking her for the Valentine with the rat on it. I’ve been preoccupied with Chinese New Year this year, which was on February 7th, and my mom found this cute rodent Valentine for us. My mom, she’s very thoughtful that way.
I’ve been very lax about posting this week. I blame my boyfriend completely. I take absolutely no responsibility. Really, it’s his fault, he’s the one that kept turning on Law & Order…..But regardless, I have been doing stuff, and here it is….
more of my alphabet, letters C and E (C was a bitch, I HATE little tiny circles!) I skipped D because it was another complicated pattern and I didn’t really have time for it. Hopefully I’ll get to it this weekend…..but other factors may prevent me from being too active in crafting for the rest of the month (godDAMN my landlord! I hate moving!)
Dessert for Valentine’s dinner made a day early. Based on Bakerella’s red velvet cake balls. My supermarket didn’t have red velvet cake mix, so I used strawberry. Note to self: never try to make a dessert involving small balls of something rolled in molten chocolate again, it’s just a pain in the butt (but oh-so delicious!)
Here’s the Valentine’s card that I made for my boyfriend. It’s hard to tell in this pic, but the words love are backed with red paper, the rest of the text is a dark brown, and the kisses are silver:
And my final thing for this week was cooking Valentine’s dinner. I didn’t get any pictures of it before we ate, but my boyfriend did. Now all I have to do is try to pry the pictures out of his DSLR-baby. Now, where did my butterknife go, I wonder……
Well, I thought I had totally flaked out yesterday. But then I remembered that I DID throw together a couple more valentine cards for local folks, and I made a super quick birthday card and FINALLY got my mom’s package out. Somehow yesterday went by faster and was more exhausting than it had reason to be. I started to make an official ‘thing’ last night but I just threw in the towel. So I did it this morning and it is my thing today. However, the idea was there last night, hence the Valentine’s Day theme.
It’s a bracelet, and it’s a bit off the beaten path that I usually follow, but I like it. It needs a little tweaking i.e. the heart needs to dangle better, but voila. Here you go.
Well, here’s my partial project for today, a mess up.
I made these as Valentine’s gifts for my girls, but matched up the wrong linings to the wrong outer shells. BUMMER! Now I don’t know whether to rip it out and do it right, or just leave it and sew up the last seam and call them done. You can cast your vote at my blog, I’m too tired to think right now!
This is what I worked on for Day 13 and Day 14–a Valentine collage for my sweetie. He likes orange, so the colors are not…traditional. I didn’t mean for it to get so cluttered but all the pictures seemed like good ideas at the time. It’s 4″ by 6″. He is German. “Zusammen” means “together” auf Deutsch.
These socks were a gift from my sister. Inspired by this post by dyslexia, I decided to use the cute valentines socks my sister gave me as arm warmers as well. I like them better as cuffs. I simply cut and hemmed the end.
I’m playing catch-up, because I forgot to post yesterday, and, even worse, I forgot to take a picture of my daily thing!
I made valentines to send to the folks on my valentine exchange list.
I went to Goodwill and bought old LPs for 25¢ a piece. (I picked ones that had love songs on them.) I ditched the album sleeves, wrote a valentine message related to one of the song titles on the Side 1 label, then made a circular mailing label the same color as the record label and glued it with spray adhesive over the Side 2 label. Took them to the post office and mailed them. Just like that. A record, with postage attached. The post office lady was quite amused.
it’s the last day of my valentine theme. hooray for worms! hooray for hearts! hooray for heartworms! (unless your pet has them. then, you know, that’s not fun.)
