Love is in the air – Kiss Kiss

Hi everyone! It’s Nat here bringing you some brand new card ideas for 2015!
With Christmas well and truly behind us I always find January a bit of a slow month to get back in the creative groove – the weather is dull, there’s not much exciting happening in the diary, and I’m usually trying to get over my post-Christmas crafty lethargy. But what usually helps is playing with some of the lovely new Valentine releases that appear in the run up to Christmas but get put to one side until Christmas is well and truly out of the way.
I seldom use the Valentine lines for their intended purpose – but I do love a love-themed collection that is nice and versatile and the Kiss Kiss collection by Crate Paper really does the job!
But love is definitely in the air today, as I wanted to share some love-themed cards using this collection and some that are a bit more everyday.
Here’s a round-up of the products I used:

You’ll also see that I’ve thrown a couple of word dies into the mix to use with this collection. You’ll have probably guessed that I am a big fan of word dies – you can do so much with them and get very different looks, exactly what I’m after in a die! The Simply Said dies by Avery Elle are particularly handy because they cut the word whole so you can easily use them for negative and positive die-cutting.
I wanted to share a quick tip for making these word dies pop on projects:

White funky foam is a really handy thing to have on standby – I have been using glittery gold paper a lot on cards of late, but it can be hard to make them stand up on cards with 3D foam as the words are quite narrow in places.
The easy solution to that is to create your own 3D foam by cutting the die from white funky foam and just gluing the glittery die-cut on top. As you can see it adds great dimension but is also really neat and tidy from the side:

I am definitely going to have to invest in more white funky foam as I think it’ll be fab with other dies, not just words – like little hearts, stars and you could definitely make your own Thickers-style letters from glitter paper and your favourite letter dies.
And gold glitter certainly goes perfectly with this collection, plus the Love die is the perfect font to match these papers. My absolute favourite paper in the Kiss Kiss collection has to be the one I used here, it’s called In Love – and I definitely was – with both the A and B-side!
The floral print is bold and gorgeous, but the ombre watercolour brush strokes on the reverse make a beautifully subtle background and I added the heart balloons from the Kiss Kiss chipboard set.
Next, I wanted to see how the Love die would work as a negative die-cut.
I love the look of wood veneer Project Life cards where the words are cut from them and using the Be Mine paper you can get a similar look:
I covered the front of this card with the Constellation paper, then attached the die-cut front panel with 3D foam and added the glittery heart banner from the chipboard accents.

Finally I cut the “you” from a scrap of the B-side of the ombre In Love paper to tie it all together.
I think I love the negative die-cut of this Love die as much as the full positive die-cut image. Very pretty!
Continuing on the love theme as soon as I saw the Love Life paper I had an idea for how I wanted to use those colour swatches:
I wanted to bring the ombre look to a card – so I die-cut some hearts from the colour squares. The colours look great against the In Love watercolour brush strokes. For extra pop I scored the die-cut hearts before gluing them down:
And for extra glitteriness I added a couple of gold enamel dots to make the greeting stand out.  But I also wanted to decorate the inside of this card too – I was on a real heart die-cutting kick so cut lots of little hearts and sewed them up into a glassine envelope to glue to the inside of the card:
Cute and really easy to do!
I used up the rest of the In Love paper to make a Valentine’s card with the Happy Valentine’s Day greeting in the chipboard set:
Once again the Constellation paper was a great backdrop to the negative die-cut heart window and I added more hearts from the chipboard accents plus a few cream enamel dots from the Simple Stories DIY Christmas pack – see those colours aren’t just for Christmas! <g>
The little chipboard love hearts are really sweet.
And the last card to feature the In Love paper is this one:
I used a spare strip of the Constellation paper and cut the frame from the B-side of the Love Rocks paper. It’s a great B-side for colour matching in this collection – there are three shades of pink on the back of the paper with this being the darkest.
Another fluttery heart, some gold glitter paper and the matching chipboard flower finished off the look.
And sadly I only have a teeny tiny piece of the In Love paper left now! But I stretched it as far as I could!
So I wanted to do some more general cards with this collection too. I love hearts on almost anything and although a lot of the chipboard accents in this collection have very Valentine’s oriented text on them, you can still use the accents and cover up text that doesn’t really work for a particular project.
I loved this big doily heart accent, but the text in the middle said Kiss Kiss… well not quite the greeting I was going for… so I die-cut another heart from the Love Life colour swatch paper and stamped hugs and kisses on and covered up that kiss kiss!

The Die-Namics fishtail flags stax and sentiment strips dies came out to play again – they are my go-to dies for this look and I wanted a more neutral pattern for the background, so used the B-side to the Be Mine paper. See, those B-sides, always useful! The enamel dots here are by Freckled Fawn, but the Pink set is currently out of stock – however I have to say the size options and colours in Freckled Fawn enamel dots are fab – check them out here.
And finally, a couple of hello cards using the Simply Said Hello die by Avery Elle. I wanted to go with some bold patterns for these cards and layer up some of the chipboard accents:
For this card I’ve used the My Heart, Gemstone, and Love Rocks papers. I wanted the sentiment to stand out more against the white background, so I cut a strip of pink vellum (love it when a purchase from 10+ years ago is the perfect solution to a crafty dilemma) and attached the greeting and enamel dots to it. The trick with vellum is hiding the way you adhere it to a project as you don’t want any glue to be on show.
By attaching the enamel dots and greeting first I could flip it over and apply glue under those spots to hide where I’d glued down that strip. Also the “love” chipboard heart hides more glue. Sneaky!
As you can see there are a few layers here – the chipboard phone is on another piece of chipboard where the wording didn’t really work for me – so I thought it would make a nice frame instead. And to highlight the heart that was already on the phone, I added a heart enamel dot. I love adding little accents like that.
Finally, a fun little notelet card using the Hello die again:
It might not be easy to spot, but this time the inside of the card is decorated with the greeting. I used the Love Rocks paper for the front and cut a window with a speech bubble die – here you can see through it…
And on the inside I used the B-side of the Gemstone paper and attached the die-cut with 3D foam so it still pops when closed:
Very fun and a very eye-catching notelet card. 🙂 I love the bold hearts and colours on the Gemstone paper and they really contrast nicely with other patterns.
And on that note, I’ll say bye for now and I’m look forward to seeing what CHA goodies will be coming into the store – I am particularly excited about blinging up my mantelpiece with some of the new Heidi Swapp Marquee Love Letters that have got all the little Magpies talking over on Instagram and Facebook.
Is there anything in particular that’s caught your fancy?