“Ars longa, vita brevis, occasio praeceps, experimentum periculosum, iudicium difficile.” -Hippocrates

This can be translated into: “Life is short, the art long, opportunity fleeting, experiment treacherous, judgement difficult.”

I’m further going to translate this into my new personal motto of: “Life is short, practice art.”

If you’ve been reading my blog for a while you know how much i love to join swaps and practice making art. This Valentine’s season was no different. I joined 3 different swaps. One, hosted by my friend, Julie Weller, one was hosted by me, and the third was hosted by my friend, Andrea Villareal. I’ll be posting pics of my swap and Andrea’s swap later this week.

Today I want to show you the beautiful Valentine’s I received from Julie’s “Queen of Hearts Swap”. The rules were to create thirteen 4″ hearts out of any medium and we could pick the colors. We then mailed them to Julie and she then mailed them back out. For some of us, we are lucky to live near each other so we took a field trip to Downtown Fullerton, CA to spend a day shopping together and exchange our hearts with each other.

I experimented with some new techniques, second, third and fourth guessed myself and came up with this heart and I’m so happy with the way it turned out. I’m not giving away any secrets about how I created this but I will say that I experimented quite a bit before I was excited with the end result.

The beautiful ribbon is from Lovebug Creations. The color used on this heart is “Panther Pink“.

The quote “You must allow me to tell you how ardently I admire and love you”, was said by Mr. Darcy in Pride and Prejudice and is from one of my favorite romantic scenes ever!

Packaging up our swaps is always part of the fun and this is the lovely variety of homemade packaging that I received. I love all of it so much that I’m going to be putting it into an art journal.

The key to swap packaging is to make it pretty but to also keep in mind that it needs to be small since it’s going to be put into a box and shipped to the girls who live far away. I always struggle with this, since I want to make a big, grandiose presentation!

Here’s how the Valentine’s all look together. The ones near the top are from this year and the ones near the bottom are from the swap that Julie hosted last year. I love how they are all so different but really show the heart and soul of each artist who made them.

These are the sweet girls who made these beautiful hearts:

Julie Weller (Hostess with the Mostess)

Jeanine Stowe Weiss

Tanya Peacock

Lori Dams

Michelle Duke

Tashia Jacques

Teah Barrow

Candice Carpenter

Mary Hansen

Teresa Cook

Kathie LePage

Margie Rowles

Taffi Graham

Thank you, ladies, from the bottom of my heart for these beautiful Valentines. I adore each and every one of these and appreciate the time you took to create these gorgeous little works of art!

Thank you so much for stopping by!  I’ll be posting pictures from my “Soldered Vintage Valentine Swap” and Andrea’s “Precious Heart Swap” later this week.

xo,

Christine Barker