Hello Butterfly

I found myself with a little extra time this weekend to squeeze in a little project for a few challenges. The colors at Color Throwdown are wonderfully neutral and when I saw them I thought about doing an old technique that, I think, might be called mother of pearl.  It involves crumpled up cling wrap and some shimmery paint.

Well, fast forward a couple of days and I see that the January challenge at CAS Mix It Up is to use cling wrap.  How's that for a coincidence?  Not one to ignore a sign from the crafty muses I got out my supplies and went to work on this card.

I had a really hard time photographing this tag so that it showed off the colors properly.  I used gray, vanilla, and black but the vanilla disappears and my mother of pearl background looks quite dingy.  One of these days I'm going to hire an actual photographer to come to my home and teach me how to take proper pictures!  The butterfly was actually done in two layers.  The solid bottom is done in vanilla and the top is actually done in vellum and has many cut-out dots.  I wish you could see how pretty this is in real life!  **sigh**  And I included one more challenge.  At Crazy 4 Challenges they are looking for tags.

Thanks for stopping by!

Stamps:  Little Notes (The Stamp Market); Mini 72 (PaperArtsy)
Paper:  Smoky Slate, Vellum (Stampin' Up!); Black Licorice (My Favorite Things); Naturals White (Neenah); Glossy (Ranger)
Ink:  Jet Black (Altenew); Frost White for Fantasitx (Tsukineko)
Accessories:  Pappillons die (4enscrap); Tag Sale: Quilted die (Papertrey Ink); enamel dots (My Mind's Eye); baker's twine; white seam binding ribbon

Freshly Made Sketches 237!

I am woefully behind on my Christmas cards this year.  Worse than usual, even!  So I took the opportunity to use Linda's new sketch at Freshly Made Sketches to add one to my meager collection.

This card, simple as it looks, gave me all sorts of trouble when I was trying to put it together.  I was using the colors from Cupcake Inspirations and the challenge at CAS Mix Up was to use stamps, heat embossing, and another thing of my choice (in my case washi tape) so I thought I'd emboss my sentiment in gold.  Bad idea.  My first three or four attempts didn't look embossed at all so I finally blamed it on a somewhat dry Versamark pad.  I finally had good luck with a gold pigment pad so I moved on to the ribbon stamps.

After I stamped the first image I found an ink smudge.  So much for adding another card to my Christmas card collection!  But the smudge was small and I knew I could edit it out so that at least it would look ok posted here.  I kept stamping away and by the time I had all those ribbons done I had about a million smudges all over the place.  I don't know where they came from, all I know is that I had to start over again.  This is the last attempt and I'm sad to report that there is a small smudge on here too, but thanks to the powers of photo editing software you can't see it!

I love this sketch and I predict that you will too and that the Freshly Made Sketches gallery this week will be filled with beautiful cards.  The FMS design team has made some beautiful cards so be sure to check them out!

Thanks for stopping by!

Supplies
Stamps:  Holiday Bows (The Ton); Joyous Noel (Verve)
Paper:  Sweet Tooth (My Favorite Things)
Ink:  Blushing Bride, Cherry Cobbler (SU); Gold (Encore)
Accessories:  washi tape