Butterfly Bliss

I  LOVE butterflies!!  They are beautiful in nature. But I adore butterfly stamps and dies just as much as the real ones. Creating with them makes me sooo happy!  Both of these cards are heading out in the mail tomorrow, so I wanted to get them up here before they were gone forever.

I started this one by cutting little strips of paper in different widths, and then different lengths. Color was added to them using Distress Inks applied with a sponge. I used 2-inch wide Scor-Tape to hold the strips together, once I had them where I liked them. I dropped water onto the strips once they were adhered together, it gives it that fun washed out, grungey look. Then I decided where the strip piece was going to go on my card and stamped the dots from Gorgeous Grunge stamp set from Stampin' Up so they would be coming from behind the strips. I added my sentiment and then cut the Vivienne Butterfly from a Memory Box die to add on top of the strips.

This one was pretty fun to make. I was playing around with my Brusho powders. They are highly pigmented watercolor crystals and so much fun to play with. You can mix a tiny bit of powder with some water and use like normal watercolors. But I have normal watercolors to do that with. The fun part is  that you can drop these crystals/powder on your paper and either add water to the crystals (I usually spritz with a water bottle) or you can drop water onto your surface and sprinkle the crystals over the water drops. That's what I did on this card.  I used my water bottle and very slowly pulled the trigger...when I do this, the water sort of pools up at the end of the nozzle and then drops in a bigger drop of water. I had to do that several times to get enough spots. Then I just sprinkled my Brusho powders over them. Here's the hard part....I had to leave it alone and let it dry naturally!!  Yep, I had to walk away and let it do it's thing. The powder needs to sit in the water to dissolve. Each color is made up of several other colors, so the powder can look a little crazy in the jar. The teal color that I used on this butterfly actually looks green in the jar. When the water hits the crystals/powder you can kinda see all the colors that were combined to make the color you are using...I love that. When you sprinkle the Brusho on your paper and then spritz with water, you get all these cool variations of color...so fun!
Anyway, after I let the card dry, I could brush off the powder that landed on the dry spots of the card and not smear the spots that were made with the water.  I use watercolor paper to do this because of it's great absorbency...and hey...it's watercolor paper, and I was using watercolors. Ha!
I had added a little more water to one of my pieces of watercolor paper that I had sprinkled the Brusho powder to. The more water you add to the inks, the more "watercolory" they look.  When that was dry I used the Darla Butterfly die from Memory Box to cut my butterfly. I used Glossy Accents to adhere the butterfly to the card. (If I want to be certain something is going to stay put, I use Glossy Accents. So far, it's never let me down)

That's all I have for now. If you have any questions, don't hesitate to ask....that's how we learn...and knowledge is POWER!

Have a great week!