Lots of Hearts with Cool New Punch

When I was blurfing yesterday (blog surfing), I spent some time on Stasia Sloma's blog. The girl's got game! As I scrolled through her archive, I came across this cool tag she made to coordinate with a birthday gift bag. That got me thinking about a new punch I have, and I skipped off to my craft room, inspired once again.

This new punch is one of 7 featured currently in the Spring Occasions Mini Catalog. The cool thing about this punch is not so much that it's a 1/2" heart, but that the punch has a hinge that makes it collapse flat for storage. I took some pictures to help illustrate what I mean.

When laid side by side with a standard SU! punch, a 1/2" circle for comparison sake, you can see that they are similar in size, but not in height. The black one's punch mechanism is handle on the exterior of the design. As you can see in the pictures of the new design (new color too), the locking mechanism on the back allows the punch to store flat when not in use. This also promotes stacking, which you CERTAINLY cannot do with the black ones!

Now on to the card I created with this nifty punch. I love this color combination, which I saw here and knew I had to make over with SU! colors. Crushed Curry and Bermuda Bay from this year's InColor collection were paired with Real Red...something about these colors together is just so cool!

I used smaller circles than Stasia did, since my hearts are smaller than her stars. I also had to make things a little more challenging for myself because I wanted the hearts to be red. I layered them on .75" circles of Whisper White, but they seemed too small on the card base. I wanted more white in the design too, so I got my 1" circle punch out and found the missing piece of the puzzle.

I didn't have the sentiment Stasia used, so I opted to go simple with a tiny "i love you" from Love Matters. This would've been a good card for last month's SAS, but love is not something only to be expressed one day a year!

I'm happy it's Friday, are you? What are your plans? Thanks for stopping by!