Once I decided on the look that I was going for, I set out to find the color palette.  Since it’s a Valentines Day card, this limited my focus to the red & pink families.  If you were creating this card as a Thank You or Birthday card, you’d have quite a few more design options.  The hardest challenge was matching Stampin’ Blends to the available ribbon colors.

On this card, I needed to use Poppy Parade Stampin Blends since I realized, too late, that I didn’t have Real Red.  When I compared the Poppy Parade to the Real Red ribbon, it was close enough.  Other options that would provide a similar Pow! effect include Magenta Madness, or any other vibrant pink Stampin Blend and color your own ribbon.  The silver- and gold-edged ribbons take the Stampin’ Blend inks very nicely and can be custom-colored to match any card.

The True Love papers each have a floral image on the front, and a patterned image on the back, all in black and white.  That makes them easy to mix and match.  For this card, though, the two sides that I wanted were on the same sheet of paper.  It was very easy then to simply cut the paper in half and there were no random scraps produced, probably the bane of every paper crafter!

Since I love to economize on my paper and cardstock, I cut the label out of the Basic Black paper that I set behind the designer series paper pieces.  You’d never know that there’s a missing chunk.to