Getting Ready For Our Valentine Lunch with Friends.

On Wednesday, February 14, we are to have lunch with three other couples. What do we have in common with these folks? All of our husbands have Parkinson's Disease. We have all been married about 50 years.  All of our husbands have had great careers. Our husbands are currently attending the "Rock Steady Boxing" exercise program here in Jackson. All are active in their church. Most of all, we enjoy being together.

Since it will be Valentine's Day, I wanted to do a little something special to celebrate our time together. I would like to share with you what I came up with.

First, I made these little boxes filled with candy. I purchased a bag of Dove Chocolates -- milk chocolate with swirls of dark chocolate wrapped in purple foil. For the box top, I chose SU Elegant Eggplant card stock.The box is small -- about 2 1/4" x 3 1/2"and about 5/8" tall. It holds 6 pieces of the chocolate. I made the flowers using a couple of punches that I have. I used Pale Plum card stock (a long retired color), sponged the edges with Elegant Eggplant ink, shaped the petals, glued two large pieces together, added one layer of the smaller petals, filled the center with glue and topped that off with yellow prills. I truly love making these flowers. I found some pieces of greenery and added them to the box top before gluing on the flower. To finish off the flower, I added a little bit of diamond stickles to the edge of each petal.

I wanted a card to go with the little boxes. I chose to do a little 3" x 3" card. It is made using white card stock for the base. For the top layer, I punched the heats out of white card stock, trimmed it to about 2 3/4" square, embossed that layer and added a piece of Elegant Eggplant card stock underneath. The last thing I had to do was make the envelopes. I think that the little boxes will look so pretty setting on the table.

I looked and looked for a sentiment to go inside the card. I couldn't find one in my stamp collection. Last night, I went looking on Pintrest. I found a quote that I thought might work. This morning I was playing with it, changed some of the words and this is the result. Using Microsoft Publisher, I created and printed the inside of my card. I was able to get the three cards I needed from one sheet of white card stock. I found the RGB code for "Elegant Eggplant" and used that as the color for the printing. It comes out being pretty close to a match.