Penguin Heart Card

Welcome to February. I can’t believe we are here already.

Today we are going to take a look at a card that I recently made and go through the steps so that you can make it as well.

I have a special someone who loves penguins just as much as I do so for their birthday a little while ago, I made a super penguin card. Here’s how to make one (go ahead and make it with whatever creatures that you love most).

I bought a Winter penguin stamping pack on boxing day one year. It was on sale at the craft store and I thought for sure I could use them at some point.

When picking out a card backing I went with a nice Wintery blueish grey. I just folded the paper in half as I wanted a bigger card because I was working with quite a few stamps.

Then I cut a white layer that was just slightly smaller than the card front. It had to be big enough so that I could lay out five penguins in a row.

Next I took all of my penguin stamps and I laid them out on the from of the card all in a row. I tried to position them to make them all first perfectly but I also wanted them to “blend” nicely and look all well matched on the front of the card.

Now comes the more tedious step…you have to stamp each penguin onto the front of the card making sure each one is perfect otherwise you’ll have to start all over again. Make sure you have enough ink on the stamp so that everything stamps clearly. I started with the two end penguins, then did the middle, and then finally did the two on either sides of the middle penguin. I was able to stamp two penguins at a time and then embossed them. The ink didn’t dry that fast.

Colouring is the next part. I decided to stamp and emboss a few of each penguin and tried out some different colour combos on them. Then I went for it on the card.

After that, I stamped the words. I wanted to keep it simple so I found a “HAPPPY” stamp, very plain, and stamped it on a grey 3 ½ inch x 1 ½ inch layer. Then I added … and wrote the rest on the inside. I glued this layer on roughly the center of the white layer.

Then I added hearts. I love penguins and hearts and they must be included together on a card. I went with your typical red hearts and then also added some blue to compliment the blue card. I scattered them around the white space on the main layer.

Lastly I glued the white layer onto the front of the card and then I was done!

Now you have a cute penguin heart card that I just realized that you can use as a cute Valentine’s card as well which is only a few days away.

Heart Pop Up Card

Are you ready for a mini theme? You should be because it’s Valentine’s Day coming up and you’re gonna get one. We are doing a couple crafty posts in the lead up to Valentine’s Day so that you can create something sweet for a special someone in your life.

Today we are making our specialty, a card. It’s not just any card...it’s a heart pop up card. Does it get better than that?

We don’t let anything go to waste here so we are going to use some of the leftover hearts that we cut out last year for our heart wreath (see it here) and use them in this card.

It may look a bit complicated but this card is actually simple.

First off, pick a colour for your card and then choose some patterned paper and a shade of cardstock to compliment the pattern.

We chose a medium shade of pink for our card and then we went with a pink polka dotted pattern piece of paper and a dark red plain sheet of cardstock for our inside heart.

We’re not using any fancy cutter today (but you certainly could if you wanted), we’ve picked a 4 inch heart that we had left over from our wreath and are tracing that on the patterned paper and the red cardstock to create the pop up heart. Trace three patterned hearts and two red cardstock hearts.

We also traced a light pink heart the same size to put on the front, but more to come on that later.

Now fold all of the hearts in half except for the one on the front. For the pattern ones fold the pattern inwards.

Cut the card to the size you want. We’re using out usual 4 ¾ x 6 ¾ size card.

Glue the hearts together so that you have a “heart fan” when you’re done. Alternate the pattern and the cardstock.

Next stamp the layer for the outside. We have picked a cute love bird stamp that we are stamping in silver on the light pink heart.

We’re going to glue this to the centre of the card.

Now we are going to fill the excess space around the big heart with some smaller hearts in a variety of sizes. We had lots leftover smaller hearts so we used those and then we tried punching some tiny hearts out of our new sparkly sticky paper.

Lastly, we’re going to glue the fan heart inside along the inside crease. We decided that it needed something a little extra so we punched two hearts to go in opposite corners of the inside of the card.

Here's the finished product. 

Love Potion and Pudding

It’s almost Valentine’s Day! And today we are making some super sweet treats that are very pink and quite festive.

We decided to try a drink called “Love Potion” and a pretty simple pink pudding with cookie dough brittle. This is kid friendly so you can get the kids to help out and make it as a treat for them or you can serve it for your sweetie and even make the drink a little more adultish (is that a word? Haha) if you want to.

How to make Love Potion

This drink was very yummy. I’ll admit, I drank mine right down when we tried making it.

Ok, so for this we just roughed it. You can look at the link below to see the actual recipe but we partly just winged a lot of it as we went along. The actual recipe makes six servings but we made four instead.

We used regular short glasses but you can use champagne flutes or wine glasses if you want a fancier drink.

In a bowl we measured a half cup of fresh raspberries along with a tablespoon each of lemon juice and granulated sugar and then we mashed it together with a fork. 

Place a spoonful of this mixture on the bottoms of the glasses. Then on top of that, place a nice heaping scoop of raspberry sorbet. 

We used this Chapman’s rainbow fruit swirl because it’s a Peanut and Nut Free brand, and just scooped around the other two flavours; that's why you see some green in the raspberry sorbet scoop.  Feel free to find a plain raspberry sorbet to use instead or you can even make one if you have an ice cream maker. 

Then the actual recipe says to fill the glass to the brim with sparkling raspberry lemonade. So that’s not a very easy thing to find at all so we used this raspberry lemonade and then mixed in some Club Soda to make it bubbly. It tasted really good, so it’s a fine option to go with if you can’t find the sparling raspberry lemonade like us. 

We just filled half the glass with the raspberry lemonade and the other half with Club Soda.  

This is what the drinks looks like all put together. Very yummy and refreshing. 

https://www.sugarhero.com/love-potion-number-9/

Vanilla Pudding with Cookie Dough Brittle

Let’s just say I have mixed feeling about this one. I’ll explain myself at the end of the recipe.

You’ll want to make the cookie dough brittle first as it needs time to set.

For the brittle you will need:

¼ cup of sugar

¼ cup of butter

2 tbsp. light corn syrup

1/3 cup of flour

1 tsp. vanilla extract

2 tbsp. of mini semi-sweet chocolate chips or chopped up semi-sweet bits (it was hard for us to find mini chocolate chips)

Line a cookie sheet with tin foil and lightly grease it.

In a small saucepan, stir together and heat the sugar, butter, and syrup. 

Remove it from the heat and stir in the flour until mixed thoroughly and then stir in the vanilla. 

Spread the mixture you just made on the cookie sheet evenly, not too thick, but not too thin. Don’t worry, it won’t fill the entire sheet. We were kinda worried about that.

 

Bake the brittle in a 350 degrees oven for about 12 minutes. If you see it turning too dark of a brown, then you can remove it early. Once you take it out, let it sit for 5 minutes, then sprinkle with the chocolate chips. Let it cool on the sheet and then place in the fridge to firm everything up. We left it in there for a few hours.

When you feel the brittle is hardened enough, you can take it out of the fridge and break it up into various sized pieces. Put it all aside in a sealed container in the fridge until ready to eat.

For the pudding you will need:

2/3 cup sugar

3 tbsp. cornstarch

¼ tsp. salt

3 cups of milk

1 beaten egg

3 beaten egg yolks

3 tbsp. butter

1 tbsp. vanilla

In a large saucepan mix the sugar, cornstarch, and salt together. Whisk in the milk. 

Cook and stir constantly over medium high heat until it’s thickened and bubbly. Once it get to this point, cook and stir for 2 minutes more. 

Then remove from the heat and stir in half of the thickened milk mixture into your whisked egg and yolks and then pour that into the pan with the other half of the milk mixture. Bring to a gentle boil (this is where we might have gone wrong because we may have heated it too much leading to the mixture getting lumpy), reduce the heat and cook for 2 more minutes.

Stir in the butter and vanilla until all mixed and melted and then if you want to make it festive, this is when you’ll add the red food colouring to make it pinkish. 

Pour it all into a bowl and cover it with plastic wrap. Make sure to cover the surface of the pudding with the plastic wrap, don’t just let it cover the top of the bowl. 

Chill and then serve with the brittle on top. You can use regular bowls to serve in or fancy glasses or ramekins work too if you’re trying to spruce it up a bit.

Overall, the brittle was really good, but the pudding was a bit lumpy and the pinkness just kinda threw me off a bit, but maybe if it wasn’t lumpy or pink, I might have enjoyed this better. Probably chilling it overnight might be better as well. It was still a tad warm when we ate it.

 

http://www.midwestliving.com/recipe/vanilla-pudding-with-chocolate-chip-cookie-brittle/