My heart is bigger than an elephant

Heh, heh, get it? Bigger than an elephant? Sorry, I really shouldn't write the text for my blog so late at night. I get slap-happy.

The elephant is from the Happy Heart Day set. I colored in the elephant with a Going Gray marker and you can see the lines. I may try using a blender pen to smooth out the marker lines. The heart at the end of the elephant's trunk is colored in with a marker and covered in Crystal Effects.

TIP: When coloring in something that I know I'm going to color in one color and then cut out, I simply color from the outside of one side of the image right on through the image to the other side. For the elephant I then went back in and colored in the toe nails with my white gel pen.

This card features retired Stampin' Up! designer paper. I cut the heart out by lightly folding a square of the designer paper in half and eyeballing/cutting out a heart like we used to do in elementary school. I used my Janome sewing machine to add some stitching around the top layer. The button in the upper right corner with the gingham ribbon threaded through it is hiding the start and end of my stitching.

TIP: when threading ribbon through button holes, cut the end of your ribbon at a very sharp angle and thread it through the top of the button and then back up from the back using the same end. This reduces the need to have two sharply angled cuts on both ends of the ribbon. This is only important because the cut end going through the button hole becomes very frayed, so you do waste a little ribbon, but there's no sense in losing waste from both ends of the piece. You can also do this while the ribbon is still on the roll and then tie your knot and snip off the second end. The cuts down on waste - no pun intended. :)

Edited to add comments that I've received:

Simone says:

"Use a floss threader to thread the ribbon through the button, then you only have to clip the end once. Works great for me." When I emailed her, thinking she was talking about a needle threader (I was picturing something like cross-stitch floss, not dental floss) She was nice enough to clarify, and said, "Nope...tooth flosser thingy. In the aisle of floss there are things called threaders, they are thick like fishing line and have a loop on one end and a point on the other.

Put one end of ribbon through the loop part and pull through with the flosser, then clip to make pretty. Sometimes the ribbon frays when I try to just thread it with a good point, like you do, but with the flosser I don't have to cut the pointed end at
all.

Look for them, it's like $1 for 5 or 10. I use them on all kinds of things. The needle threader is too flimsy (I broke mine) but the floss threaders are perfect."

And Melissa also commented with her solution:

"Singe the end quickly with a lighter, then it won't fray at all. The S.U. ribbons work amazingly well for this."

Thanks for reading, and don't forget to check out my stamps for sale in the post before this one!