Valentine for Troy 2010!

HOORAY! It's finally here! I finished the Valentine for Troy. Since his girlfriend is not on my contact list I'm going to go ahead and post the picutres of the finished tags before the big day. Hopefully she won't stumble across this and ruin the surprise! (what are the chances???)



As usual this project went through several stages before ending up with the final product. The task: create 20 tags which will be suspended in the air by helium balloons. On one side, a decorative element, on the other, a custom quote about... you guessed it... Love. How sweet! Troy of course came up with the theme "Love is in the air" and I designed the tag element.

Of course no project is complete without starting off purchasing some expensive toy I simply have to have! This time it was some oval shaped dies from Nestabilities. Yes, I have a Cricut, I know... but it's really hard to get the scallops exactly right... this was much easier. So off to my favorite art supply store for that. I also picked up some pre-made tags to make my life a little easier.

Next I went to Paper Zone and picked up some sparkly red paper, white cardstock and some brown paper that matched the brown of the tags. The trick was... how to get the quotes printed on the pre-made tags? I thought at first I would print them onto the brown paper and then cut that out and paste it onto the tag, but I ended up deciding to use clear avery address labels instead! They are not seemless but they did not look too bad at the end of the day so I was OK with that.

Then I ran into another challenge getting the phrase "love is in the air" onto the red oval on the front of the tag. I tried using the clear labels again but I really was not happy with the way the tag showed up. I finally decided to just stamp the word love on the front using a .99 stamp set I picked up somewhere. Conveniently the font was similar enough to the font I used on the back to work!

Now I had to adhere the oval onto the tag. I didn't like the big blank space so I used a swirl background stamp with white Brilliance stamp pad and I liked the effect. Finally I switched the orientation of the oval... since the tags will be hanging that way I thought it made more sense and it was more asthetically pleasing too. :-) So if you want to know why it takes me 4 weeks to finish a project... now you know! (and it's a good thing that my boss doesn't mind that I glue things together at my desk or it would take 6 weeks!)

Here they are!



There are 20 of them



And on the backside are the quotes!



What do you think?