Love Is In the Air {at HMITM}

I meant to post this last Monday, on Valentine's Day, but the week ran away from me. Our current challenge at How Much Is Too Much is called "Love Is in the Air," and it's a fun one! Here's the clever challenge Debbie Fitzgerald posed:

• Create a layout about someone (or something) you love.
• Use 2 photos and 14 hearts.
• The colors of the layouts should be predominantly red and brown. (think about those boxes of chocolate!)
• Use an arrow somewhere on your page (think Cupid!)
• Incorporate a flower or two on your page (like those expensive rose bouquets)
• Use ribbon or frills (Did you know that ribbons were given to knights by their beloveds before they went off to battle?)

You still have a full week to play. And in case you didn't know, for 2011, we've added a little twist to our challenge: We will choose a player each month to be our guest designer for a future month. So fun!

Here's the page I made. I dug out some old BasicGrey (Sugared and Infuse) to make my page. The most challenging part for me was the 14 hearts, but I finally figured out how to incorporate all of them into my design. And when I first read that we had to use red and brown as our main colors, I didn't think I'd like it, but I really love the way the colors look with the black and white photos. I added private journaling on the back of my layout. Farzad and I have been together for 30 Valentine's Days. We'll be celebrating our 30th anniversary this July!

A few close-ups. The pretty brad is by Making Memories, and the tan chipboard hearts are Maya Road.

I originally didn't have those striped strips of paper beside the photos, but I was stumped about how to include more hearts, so this did the trick. I trimmed a few from the paper, inked the edges and scattered them around my page to make up the required number of hearts. I snuck a little BasicGrey glazed brad that had hearts on the side to count for one of my 14 heart elements.

The sparkly chipboard heart is Making Memories, and that brad is really old--by SEI.

For my arrow, I used an old 7 Gypsies photo turn, topped with a pearl brad.

Come by HMITM and see what the rest of the team did with this challenge. So fun to see everyone's different interpretations of the same challenge! I hope you'll play along, too! Thank you for visiting my blog and reading about my page!