Awesome Orange Butterflies

This bright and colourful card was a lot of fun to make. It’s a response to five challenges. Less is More asked for use of a stencil which I felt went well with Inkspirational‘s masking challenge. The Sisterhood of Crafters gave the challenge to create your own background. Addicted to CAS provided a cue word – “fly”. And finally Simon Says Stamp Wednesday said that anything goes!

I don’t have any stencils. I’d read suggestions about making your own stencils using die cuts. But I don’t (yet) have a die cutter either. I do have a butterfly punch. So I created a make-shift stencil by punching the butterfly punch into a snippet of card. I then placed the “stencil” onto my white card panel, masking off the bit outside the butterfly shape in the process, and used a make up sponge and Spiced Marmalade Distress Ink to colour in the butterfly. I repeated this process, moving the stencil each time, to cover the card completely with butterflies.

I made sure to vary the angle of the butterflies to make the card a bit more interesting. Plus that way there was less ungainly white space between them. I also varied the amount of ink used. I made some butterflies with a freshly inked sponge, and others when the sponge had been used for one or two butterflies since the previous inking.

After filling the background with lovely orange butterflies I created my sentiment panel. The great thing about the panel is that I was able to use it to cover up an area that hadn’t gone to plan! I used Memento Tuxedo Black to stamp the sentiment, which comes from Altenew’s Super Script, onto a strip of white card. I then took some strips of gold paper (the colour didn’t come through very well in the photo!) and adhered that to the top and bottom of the sentiment panel.

Assembly of the card was fairly straight forward. I created a card base with a piece of plain white card. I trimmed the patterned panel to be slightly smaller than the front of the card base. I adhered the sentiment strip to the butterfly panel using my tape runner. I then attached the panel to the card base using foam tape to give some dimension.

I’m really rather happy with this card. It’s bold and bright. A very cheerful card. The technique was a lot of fun and looking at it seemed to work really well. I can see myself using this technique again in future. One issue I have with the card is that a few places I accidentally went over the outside edge of the stencil as it was such a small piece of card. This led to some marks and smudgy looking areas on the card – not exactly what I was after. But they’re not too obvious, and as I said, overall I’m very happy with how it turned out!

Love,

Lady Joyful