These colorful cards are so much fun to make. You are literally arranging flowers -- paper flowers -- to make a gorgeous greeting card bouquet. No two come out exactly alike!

The color scheme we used for this design is great for Valentine's Day or for somebody in the Red Hat Society, but you'll probably come up with your own color scheme.

Start with old floral greetings cards, wallpaper, or floral printed scrapbook paper (you need two or more copies of each individual flower). Take scissors and cut out individual flowers and leaves (this is good busy work to do while watching television). When it comes to assemble the card, you can arrange your cutouts to your pleasing, then use pop dot foam adhesives to layer leaves and petals over your base to give the bouquet a three-dimensional quality.

These cards are great for all kinds of celebrations, such as birthdays, Valentine's Day, Easter, Mother's Day or just to let someone special know you are thinking about them.

1. Cut the background paper slightly smaller than the front of the card blank. We used one of Fiskar's decorative corner punches to punch a small design in the corners of the background paper, just to give it extra interest. If you don't have a corner punch, skip this part. Use your adhesive of choice to affix the background paper to the card blank.

2. Use the border punch to cut four border strips. Apply adhesive of choice to the border strips and apply background paper in order to form a frame for the flowers. To miter the border corners, hold two strips at right angles to one another, use scissors or a craft knife to cut through both strips at the diagonal where they meet. (If you don't have a border punch, see the notes at the bottom of this page.)

3. Cut 3 or 4 hearts in graduating sizes from the contrasting papers being used to make the card. These will form the "vase" for the paper flower bouquet. Use adhesives to stack the hearts as in the photo.
Note: You can give the hearts some dimension by using pop dot adhesive between the layers.

4. Affix the stacked heart element to the card by applying adhesive to 3 sides only. Leaving the top edge loose allows you to tuck the paper flowers inside for more natural look.

NOTE ON THE FLOWERS:
The steps below show how make the three dimensional bouquet. While the photos show flowers from a different design in this series, the technique is the same for this card as well.

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Step 5. Begin arranging your flowers by placing a flat base layer down with regular adhesives (as opposed to pop dots). You will begin to layer upon this in the next step, but right now you are created the underlying base layer of flowers. While photo #5 shows flowers being arranged "in a narrow rimmed vase" for another card design in this series, the technique for building the floral bouquet in this card is essentially the same, except that in this card, the flowers are growing out the heart shaped vase in a more freeform fashion.	Step 6. Look at your base and decide where you will layer other flowers and/or individual petals and leaves. Cut out the necessary parts and pieces and attach pop dots to the backs of these elements. FRUGAL TIP: You can use pieces of the backing as well as the dots when using foam backed adhesives (as shown above) -- no waste!

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Step 7. Start building three dimensional layers by sticking the pop-dotted elements over the base flowers. Continue adding and layering until you are happy with the finished look of the bouquet. Step 8. Use a small heart punch to punch out hearts from the contrasting papers. Scatter and attach as in the photo at the top of the page.	*BORDER PUNCH INFO AND ALTERNATIVES We used Fiskar's lace design border punch. You could just as easily use other border punch designs. Don't have a border punch? Use decorative scissors to cut border strips or use border stickers. Click here to browse the border punch selection at Amazon.com.