Sweet as Sugar

This week's Docrafts Creativity challenge is an inspiration one, with a nostalgia-provoking photograph of some Love Hearts sweets. When making cards for challenges, it usually helps me to have a recipient in mind (and stops me accumulating even more cards waiting for just the right occasion …). For this challenge, the recipient will be my mother. Had my father been alive, it would have been my parents' Golden Wedding anniversary next week. I wanted to send my mum a card to let her know that I was thinking about her especially at what could be a sad time. "Love You" seemed just the right thing to say.

The colours in the photograph immediately reminded me of some paper that I had in my stash, so I was off to a speedy start. I thought I'd repeat the dangling of an element in front of the main card, which had worked well for my nephew's birthday card a couple of weeks ago. I'd tried to explain orally how this looked to my mother but didn't think I'd got it across all that well. Now I'd send her one of her own and hope that makes it clearer.

The background paper was quite busy so I didn't want to make things too complicated but the pair of "danglers" wasn't enough on its own. Also, I wanted to include something that represented the sweets. I punched about a dozen small hearts from various parts of a multi-patterned paper and intended to punch their circular backings - but my smallest circle punch was not quite big enough and the next smallest was too big. A kind of a Goldilocks moment. Nestability die cuts to the rescue. The smallest circle was just right and so I embarked upon repeatedly putting textured white card through my Cuttlebug. It was a great boon that the machine works in both directions, although re-assembling the plate sandwich for each pass was much more fiddly and time-consuming than using a punch would have been … but that wasn't an option.

I inked the edges of everything with a really old tired pastel pink inkpad that is always in my essentials box - such a useful colour. It has a bit of a chalky feel to it, which seemed to match that of the sweets - at least in my memory. Can't quite recall how they tasted: not getting further than sugary! Were the different colours differently flavoured?

The small hearts were stuck flat on the circles, which were then mounted, in as random a manner as I could manage, onto the background paper using 1 mm foam pads. The acetate strips for the "danglers" were sandwiched between two larger punched hearts and secured to the card behind the backing paper. A single small heart mounted with a foam pad on one heart and a rub-on sentiment on the other finished off the card.

Quite a simple, but effective, card, I feel. Odd not to have used any ribbon; I found some suitable colours but they seemed unnecessary with so much stripy paper. I'm very pleased with the colours: I like it when pastels are bright and vibrant rather than really pale. And - an unusual outcome for my cards - it should travel through the post really well. Think Mummy will have a smile when she sees it. She's doing the church flowers in Daddy's memory this week and, most appropriately, has chosen a gold colour theme. Think it would have been weird though - and not in keeping with the challenge inspiration photograph - to use gold for this card. I did love making all those men's cards recently but it is nice to be back to prettiness as well as style and design.