I’ve used neon colors for a summer-themed card, Christmas cards and a birthday card, so Valentine’s Day neon seems like a natural progression. This trend is not going anywhere. Neon is fun, retro (so many craft products are retro-themed lately) and screams, “Hey! Look at this awesome, happy project!”

I relied on brads instead of adhesive to attach the transparency to the card. Not having to wait for glue to dry is a bonus. To prevent the recipient from being blinded by love, I tempered my neon pink with layers of patterned transparency, vellum and cardstock in gray, black and white.

Here’s how to make it:

Make a card from a 5-by-10-inch piece of neon-pink cardstock. Cut a 4 1/2-inch-square piece of a transparency that features a gray, flocked damask pattern (such as “Show” from the Road Show collection by Nancie Rowe-Jamitz for Fancy Pants Designs). Cut strips of diagonal-stripe cardstocks in gray and white, black and white and spot-varnished black (I cut my pieces from striped papers at an angle) in different lengths and widths, with one end of each trimmed on the diagonal. Place the transparency, centered, over the card’s front and adhere the strips vertically over the card’s top edge and close to the transparency’s left edge. Trim any excess hanging over the top edge. Attach a large, black rhinestone brad near the upper-left corner and a large, clear rhinestone brad and a large, gray brad that features a black crown over the striped strips (all of my brads are from the On the Edge collection by Teresa Collins).

Stamp a dotted-heart image (mine’s by Recollections) in multi-surface black ink (I used StazOn in jet black) onto a piece of vellum.

Cut out the heart and use it as a guide to draw a slightly larger heart in pencil onto another piece of vellum. Adhere the stamped heart onto the larger heart. Trace the edge of the dotted heart in white pen (such as Sakura Gelly Roll in white).

Adhere the vellum to the upper-left portion of the card, over the striped strips. Affix hot-pink, gray and black rhinestones of different sizes and a light-pink, heart-shaped rhinestone in a random fashion to the upper-left portion of the card.