Butterflies!

I had the day off from work today so of course, that means crafty time!  For a little inspiration, I checked out the current sketch over at Just Cards.  I’ve been wanting to use more of my Paper Wishes templates, so I selected the 15 Butterflies and Dragonflies, 15 Lovely Labels and Layered Labels templates. I also threw in some smooch inks to color the butterflies.  Here’s what I came up with.

It took quite a bit of practice to figure out how to color with the inks.  The large butterfly is the first one I did.  I think I like the technique I used on the smaller butterflies better.  I’m sure you will be seeing more of those here. They are really quite fun to make!

Everything on this card except the top and bottom corners, the lacy border across the center, and the holes in the corners of the red label is hand cut.  It wasn’t all that difficult either.

Mosaic Butterfly

I love challenges, they’re great for inspiration!  This week’s challenge on the Paper Wishes forum is to make a mosaic.  Since I recently purchased the 15 Butterflies and Dragonflies template. I decided upon a mosaic butterfly. I saw a mosaic heart made from smaller hearts on Pinterest a while back, so I decided to use tiny butterfly punch outs for mine.

The flower is two of the Spellbinders Sunflower 2 die cuts stacked (one is from the card I made last Monday).  I rotated them slightly and then pulled the petals from the bottom layer up between the petals on the top layer.  You can’t see it very well, but I made the background paper with Smooch Inks using the marbling technique.

Airbrushed Lighthouse

I used one of the gift certificates I received for Christmas to buy a Copic airbrush.  One of the things I really like about it is that since it uses Copic pens, there’s really no clean-up.  I’m still learning the basics, but what fun! I have quite a collection of brass stencils, so I selected one with a lighthouse on it and here is what I created.

After I removed the stencil from the background, I decided that the overspray made a nice frame, so I added a little more color and cut about 1/4” away from the stencil border.  The yellow card I used for a background isn’t really that bright, I don’t know why it scanned that way, the rest of the colors are about right. It’s closer to the shade of the yellow on the lighthouse lamp.

This was a lot of fun to make and I’m looking forward to collecting some more colors.  Right now, all I have is blue, red, yellow and brown.  They’re fairly expensive, so I’ve been using 40% and 50% off coupons to buy them one at a time from Michaels.

Iris Fold Sunflower

I made this birthday card with my Spellbinders Sunflower 2 die.  My original intent was to make a blue flower, but after I removed the die-cut flower, I noticed that the left-over blue paper had a perfect aperture for iris folding.  I used my pentagon template for this card, but the hexagon template would also work.

Spirelli Birthday Cards

Spellbinders scalloped oval and circle die templates are perfect for Spirelli.  Here are a couple cards I made recently using the Oval templates.  I cut one large and one small oval and stacked them.

I gave this card to my mom for her birthday.  The butterfly is from the Mix ‘ems Butterflies pack from Paper Wishes.  I used a gold butterfly and shaeded the wing insets with a blue Copic marker.

Banner Birthday

I finally got to play with my build a banner template that I received from Paper Wishes at the beginning of December.  The template comes with three different shaped banners in several sizes as well as templates for other shapes (19 shapes total, including the banners).  I’m just about out of birthday cards, so that’s what I decided to make.  Yes banners are simple and yes, I could have easily done this without the template, but I don’t like measuring, which is why I just love templates!

The butterflies at the bottom were punched with the Martha Stewart butterfly border punch.  I adhered them to a piece of yellow paper and then cut out around the butterflies and also cut out the spaces in between the butterflies.  It’s not too difficult if you have some good precision point scissors and I really like the effect.