Beautiful Butterflies

This butterfly themed card was inspired by this week’s color challenge in the Play Date Cafe.  I would never think of making a feminine card with such dark colors, but I love how they pull together.

I made the butterfly embellishments by layering several die cut butterflies on top of a label die cut.  If you look closely, you will note that the labels and the butterflies have a bit of shimmer. It isn’t hard to make sparkly or glossy cardstock, and I explain how below.  I wanted the butterflies to have a fair bit of dimension, so I folded each die cut just a bit along the center line.  I used glue dots to adhere the top two butterflies to the larger butterfly on the bottom.  Since the pieces were so small, I folded the glue dots in half with my paper piercing tool before I stuck them to the butterflies.  This also added extra dimension.  The largest butterfly in each stack is adhered to the label die cut with a foam dimensional square to make it pop even more.  The final step in creating each embellishment was to attach small pearl dots to each butterfly and label.

There are a few design elements on this card that are worth pointing out.  You might notice, for example, that the top butterflies on the middle label are larger that the top butterflies on the top and bottom labels. Also, I repeated each of the colours, grey, purple and green, several times as I layered the base, labels, and butterflies in each stack. 

Tips and Tricks – Rounding Corners without a Corner Rounder

I wanted to round off the corners of this card, but I didn’t have corner rounders of the right size.  So, I punched templates with two circle punches (one slightly larger than the other).  I used these templates to trace a round corner on the back side of the cardstock, and then hand cut the corners with my scissors.

Stamping Technique – Making Glossy and Sparkly Paper from Cardstock

I started with regular cardstock, and inked it up with my Versamark ink pad, by tamping the pad down on the paper (see photo).  The Versamark ink stays sticky for a little while, so once the cardstock was inked up, I was able to coat the cardstock with embossing powder.  I embossed the grey cardstock with clear embossing powder, and the green cardstock with an embossing powder called “Iridescent Ice” from Stampin’ Up! which has a bit of glitter mixed in.