A Little Love

I *love* Valentine's Day. I'm normally not a huge fan of pinks and reds but when I see all the Valentine decor in the stores I go nuts - seriously, it's one of my favorite holidays! I decided to test out the new printer by creating some hearts using digital scrapbook paper, printing, cutting, and turning it into some love for my windows. Here's what I did:

I started with this heart (found on the Back to School CD collection from Digital Scrapbook Memories):



Then I selected various digital scrapbook papers from my stash - I used my ACDSee Photo Manager program, which is what I use to organize all of my stuff, and searched for "pink", "red", and "purple" to find papers that would work for this. (It has taken me hours to go through everything and tag it, but it's so worth it! It makes it so easy to find just what you are looking for.)

In photoshop, I opened a blank document. Since I have lots of white 8x8 inch cardstock, I set my document to 8x8 inches. I resized my hearts so I could fit four smaller ones on a page, and two large ones one a page. Then I started adding the papers using clipping masks. (For more info on clipping masks, see my tutorial here. It's so easy and I use this trick all the time!)

Then I just printed and cut:



To assemble, all I used was scissors, string, and some glue. Easy as pie!



Also, since this heart isn't exactly symmetrical, I knew that they wouldn't match up when placed back to back. So I printed half one way, then I flipped the heart (in photoshop: Image>Rotate>Flip Layer Horizontal) and printed the other half the other way. You can kind of see the difference here:



Then just glue them together on the string:





And hang!





So although my light magenta ink cartridge is almost empty, I have these pretty little mobiles hanging from all my windows! :) Happy Valentine's Day!

xoxo,