Happy Valentine's Day!

This will be my ninth Valentine's Day with my husband. We had been only dating a week (and a day) when we celebrated our first Valentine's Day together. He got me a single red rose as we walked to the local college bar for a non-date, with his best friend Duncan tagging along. I reluctantly shared with him some Valentine's Day chocolate I had grabbed from a bowl on my way out to meet him. It was not romantic, but it was a perfect reflection of us.

I don't normally get sappy, but I did make him something for this Valentine's Day. It's an 8x10" print that captures our most important dates: first date, engagement, wedding, buying our home, Adrian's birth and Celeste's birth. I hope to hang it in our art-less bedroom.

True to my style, I wanted to keep it simple. There are a lot of different ways to do this type of print, but a few things were important to me:

I did not want to label each date. This print was for my husband, for us. Not to hang somewhere for everyone to see, so I felt that labeling the dates was unnecessary. We knew what the dates meant and not having them labeled made it more personal and intimate.

I wanted to use the font from our wedding invitations to designate our wedding date.

I wanted to keep it mostly black and white, with one pop of romantic red.

I started with my trusty chalkboard background. The same one I used in the header for our website. Then I layed out all the dates in different, but complementary fonts in all white. I used our wedding font for our wedding date and changed the periods to hearts. Then I used Pantone's Red 032 for the color.

After playing around with the shades for the other dates, I settled on a slight gradient of white and gray, with white at the top and bottom, lightest gray (black @ 20%) on the next set of dates and a slightly deeper gray (black @ 35%) on the date right under the red.

Eddie, hope you like it! Happy Valentine's Day!