Trio of Butterflies

For this card I used a sketch from http://deconstructingjen.com/archives/5789 and this is what it looks like:

I had no idea where I was going with this sketch until I saw the Tuesday Trigger over at Moxie Fab World:

  I love how the birds are stacked up! Seeing the birds gave me the idea to use butterflies. So since I have been trying to use older stamps I grabbed these oldies but goodies that are from Hero Arts.

Aren't they pretty? I picked three of them to use on the card.

I am also playing in this weeks City Crafters Challenge Blog. They turned 2 and it is their 104th week! This weeks challenge is called Case Me If You Can. Here is the link to this weeks CCCB so you can see what all is going on overe there: http://citycrafter.blogspot.com/2012/04/happy-birthday-city-crafter-challenge.htmlYou can pick from any of the 103 challenges. I chose CCCB #91 Back to Black and here is the link: http://www.citycrafter.blogspot.com/2012/01/city-crafter-challenge-blog-week-91.html.

Here is how my card turned out:

I decided to use pink with the black. The PP and cardstock is from Creative Memories and the Carnation blank card is from Rubber Soul. I started with the PP and used two sizes of the Long Classic Rectangles dies from Spellbinders on black CS. On the larger rectangle I layered a piece of PP and on the smaller rectangle I layered a piece of dark pink  CS that I had embossed in the Cuttlebug.

The scallops were die cut with a scalloped Spellbinders die and the edges inked with Black Soot Distress ink. I adhered all the layers to the card. Now it was time to make the butterflies.

I  stamped all three butterflies on Solar White Neenah  paper with black ink and fussy cut them out and inked the edges so no white paper would show

Here is a tip: when you have a stamp with a lot of solid background sometimes it's hard to get good ink coverage so what I have found that works great is to first ink your stamp in VersaMark Ink (you can even wipe it off a bit) then ink it with whatever color you want and you should get perfect coverage.

Next I sprayed the butterflies with Perfect Peals mixed with water to give them some shine (It is a little hard to capture the shine with the camera especially on a cloudy day like today so I hope you can see it.). I added three large pearls for the butterflies body and black floss for their feelers and adhered them with foam dots to pop them off the cardstock.

And last but not least I added pen stitching around the entire card. It seemed to pull everything together when I did this. I haven't done pen stitching on anything for a long time. I use to do it a lot on scrapbook pages so it's nice to bring back an old favorite technique.

I haven't added a sentiment so I can add it later when I need a certain card. But I think it is going to my  MIL's Mother's day card. We'll see.

I even ran the flap of the envelope through the Cuttlebug with the same embossing folder I used on the card and stamped one of the butterflies on the front side of the envelope.

Hope the sun is shinning wherever you are today!

Hats off to Dads

A new challenge is up at City Crafter Challenge Blog: http://citycrafter.blogspot.com/2012/04/city-crafter-challenge-blog-week103.html The challenge is to create a project with a hat or the word hat or both.For this challenge I created a Father's Day card:

I found the sketch at Paper Trey Ink in celebration of their 5th anniversary. The hat is from this dollar set of clear stamps:

I stamped the hat onto white cardstock with black ink, used black embossing powder then cut it out. The pattern paper is CM.  Die cut an oval and stamped it with the flourish oval and the sentiment.

This was a fun card to make and came together rather quickly for it being a masculine card. I think it helped having the hat stamp and sketch as a starting point.

Wishing all a happy, happy Easter!