Hi Blog Hoppers! 
Welcome to the Control Freaks January Blog Hop where we are going to share our latest Valentine's Day Projects for the ones that we love! Didn't you just love what my friend Connie Babbert shared on her blog. Her creativity just amazes me!
This week I had my first class since the New Year began and I was excited to share some of the new goodies Stampin'Up! came out with in our new mini-catalog titled "Celebrate the Everyday"! One of the things that I was the most excited to play with was the new Spiral Flower Originals Die. Wow is this thing fun! I decided to start with simple flowers and the two little tips I will share with you is that having a fine tipped tweezers or a skinny dowel makes the job much easier. Just start rolling until you get to the end, then let the flower loosen up and play with it a bit to make it look pretty. The most challenging part was figuring out how to glue the little beauties. I really didn't want to have to get the glue gun out, and I found liquid glue was just too messy and took too long to dry. The perfect adhesive turned out to be glue dots. Just pop a few glue dots on the flower base, and give it a little pressure and it is magic! I used some skinny dowels for the flowers - one I inserted thru a hole I poked in the bottom of the flower, and the other I wanted the flower to face forward so I just slipped the dowel up inbetween the flower base and the flower. I added a little seam binding ribbon that I dyed with a Pear Pizzazz reinker to look like leaves and decided to add a little diamond in the center! The little jars can be found at your local craft store in the dollar bins!

I hope you also noticed the beautiful red and white fringe flower I made. This was done with our new fringe scissors! Oh my - I was so excited to know that these weren't just for making grass! I am excited to explore the many different things we can do with these awesome scissors!
As a Valentine's Day treat to my customers, I had them all make a vase of flowers and I cannot tell you how excited they were to make them. Many of the ladies said they were going to put them on their desk at work!!

I also want to share a beautiful Valentine's Day card that I made at my class! I love using our framelits for cutting things out but I sometimes forget that they are great for making a window in our cards and this new Flowerfull Heart stamp seemed like the perfect thing. We also used the cherry cobbler embossing powder to jazz it up a bit! I hope you can see the texture on the front of the card from the Scallops Textured Embossing folder. I also did a couple of rows on the inside too! This folder is really cute! I have used mine so much in the past two weeks I already broke it! Well actually - I wasn't paying very good attention and put it thru very crooked and cracked the seam. I learned my lesson! I was able to tape it back together and get thru class but I guess I will need to order another one!
That is all for now - I will share some more of my beautiful Valentine's in the next few days! Now it is time for you to hop on over to see what LeeAnn Greff has to share - I am sure it will be inspiring!

