Hang in there and a crochet heart doily

Hello peeps!

Before I get to my post, I would like to welcome my blog's new follower.  I'm so happy you decided to click the magic little follow button and hope you will find reason to stop in from time to time!

I hope everyone had a truly fantastic weekend!  I spent mine at a crop for the cure, which was very relaxing and I got to catch up a teeny bit on my scrapbooking (if such a thing exists), not to mention I didn't have to do any cooking or cleaning!  Does it get any better than that?

I have a birthday card to share today.  This one is for my mom, who has a distaste for her birthday, but she loves cats just as much as I do, so I thought this would be perfect:

I just love this stamp!  So full of possibilities...

Some info on my card:

Paper - Basic Grey DP from the Olivia collection, Bazzill card and 300g hot pressed water colour paper

Image - Penny Black coloured with Distress Inks (frayed burlap, antique linen, victorian velvet, spun sugar, stormy sky, tumbled glass, black soot and tattered rose)

Cuts - Magnolia Doohickey leaves, Cheery Lynn small exotic butterflies (cut on pink and swiped with picket fence distress stain to tone them down and give them a white washed look),  the shape for the image was created in SCAL2 using a rectangle and ovals

Other - sheer cloth, pretty petals flowers, mini clothes pins (which started out bright pink, so I painted them white with acrylic paint), hemp twine, American Crafts pink lace, computer generated sentiment and a crocheted heart doily. 

The doily on this card is my second attempt at designing a heart doily.  I now understand why patterns for heart doilies are impossible to find.  Luckily it is tucked in behind the image, hiding the fact that it is way too long.  However, I am nothing if not stubborn and persistent, so I tried again and came up with a shorter version:

It is not without flaws - most notably at the base where it just isn't even from one side to the other, though  a good starching would probably hide most of that (this one has not been starched).  If you are interested, I'll be adding my pattern at the end of this post within the next 24 hrs, so check back later.  I expect it will take a little while to type up all that code.  As I am not 100% happy with it, I will probably attempt designing another completely different pattern, but probably not until next year once I forget how frustrating the design process is :).

I've added the pattern to my blog in a new post available here.

This card was inspired by insanity and the following challenges:

Basic Grey Challenges - Mother's Day or Girlie - you choose
Simon Says Stamp Challenge - Let's Play Bingo (I did flowers, lace and twine)
Totally Papercrafts - Humour (ok, so it's not ROTFL or even lol, but it might be good for a teeny smile)
The Sketchy Challenges - love this sketch; this is my second entry
Cute Card Thursday - where anything goes

Hope everyone has a great week!  Thanks for stopping by and for taking the time to leave a comment!  I do love reading them and I love the chance to visit you too.

Hugs,

Dawn