CIE Beautiful Butterflies

Hi, everyone! It's a Cards in Envy Monday! In anticipation of spring, our theme for the next two weeks is butterflies.

Sounded like a perfect opportunity to ink up some Paper Smooches Graceful Beauties.

Canson watercolor; Moxie winterland dp; Martha Stewart matstack foil; Recollections black
Paper Smooches graceful beauties image and sentiment in StazOn jet black
(butterfly fill: Memento black)
Paper Smooches scallop die; stash sequins
Distress Inks: tumbled glass, dusty concord, milled lavender, black soot
adhesives: Scotch ATG; Ranger multi medium matte

I'm all about truth in advertising. Let the record show that my card is a CASE of a card shared by Michelle Boyer on the Paper Smooches blog. The original PS post can be seen by clicking here. When this card was made, I was in need of a sympathy card for a card drive posted by Jennifer McGuire on January 19. And, truth be told, Michelle's card was so perfectly designed, I didn't make very many changes.

• I quickly decided I wanted to stay with Michelle's choice of butterfly and swirl. Searching my stash, I found a pretty piece of dp that mimicked the swirl design. (The paper is actually a winter pattern I'd been saving hoarding for several years.)
• My image and sentiment were stamped in StazOn jet black since I was going to be working with water-based inks. My one regret is that my sentiment slants a little uphill. Unfortunately, it didn't look so slanted until I was done with the card.  :(
• I then played with some Distress Inks to create the watercolor pattern, choosing various Distress Inks from the complementary papers in this winter collection.) My watercoloring technique is less smooshing and more lightly tapping/pressing, being sure to dry the paper inbetween taps/presses and dabbing off excess/unwanted ink splatters with a paper towel.
• Because this was for Jennifer's card drive -- and because I was thinking of posting this for our CIE challenge, I decided against a button-type of embellishment. Instead, I chose to go with a strip of pretty foil paper and a few sequins.
• When my panel was finished, I decided to mount it on a watercolor card base and placed a layer of that pretty foil paper between this panel and the base. The foil seemed to be a perfect way to pop the panel's complementary blues.

A quick reminder that CIE has lifted its A2 requirement. However, cards still need to be flat enough to fit into a envelopes.

Parting Thoughts

A new challenge starts at Words 2 Craft By on Wednesday. Something tells me there might be a butterfly or two over there, too. Hope you'll stop by and check out our March W2CB words.

Have a great week! Thanks for stopping and happy scrappin'!