Hearts, flowers ... and a little quilling

Last night was almost a disaster for me. I attended a meeting of our village Women's Institute where I was fortunate enough to sell a few cards and also won a prize in the raffle. The prize I chose was a beautiful table decoration of fresh flowers which had been specially prepared for the meeting, and I could see that the colours in it would make a fabulous photograph - just perfect for me to use in some card designs.

Well, I collected it at the end of the evening,  put it in a bag with my card baskets ... and on the way home, water leaked from the arrangement all over half of my cards! What a panic - especially as I was due to take the cards to my regular market this morning! Fortunately, each card is securely wrapped in cellophane, so there was no lasting damage - but at eleven o'clock last night I had to check each one over and wipe it dry, ready for loading up in the basket again today.

Meanwhile, the flowers were rapidly wilting in the hot weather we are having. So I quickly took some photos before leaving for the market, and have used one of them this afternoon to make this card.

On my Apple Mac computer, it is easy to create circles, squares and ovals for my card designs, but unfortunately the menu of shapes in the program I use does not include a heart. So I had to create this one using two circles, and oval and a triangle overlapping. I pulled sections of my chosen photograph into the two circles and the triangle, leaving the central oval plain for the "With love" wording. Then all it needed was a little quilling!

Here's the original flower arrangement in all its glory:

I'm sure that I will soon be using it in some other card designs for quilling, as the colours are fantastic.

I hope you will agree that I chose well!