Purple Love

 

I wanted to use my new Swallowtail stamp again and I found a great sketch at Freshly Made Sketches to inspire me.  I did change it a little and made mine a square card instead so that I could fit the whole butterfly on.

I stamped and embossed the Swallowtail with Elegant Eggplant onto crumb cake card and painted over it with white ink.  Then I used wisteria, eggplant and calypso coral markers and a blender pen to colour it.

Ingredients :

Stamps : Swallowtail, Curly Cute

Card : wisteria, white, crumb cake, grey

Ink : stazon, white, versamark, eggplant, markers (eggplant, wisteria, coral)

Other : big shot, elegant bouquet ef, white pen, blender pen

 

When my 11 year old daughter saw this card she begged me to give it to her for her birthday this year.  She is a “purple girl”! :)  Her birthday isn’t till August but she just fell in love with this pretty purple butterfly. I’ll save it and give it to her, hopefully she’ll forget about it and be surprised and in love with it all over again!

 

Kathy

Retiring Butterflies

At Just Add Ink this week we have a gorgeous photo to take some inspiration from.



I had been asked to make a retirement card for a teacher at the girls’ school and I decided to use this photo challenge to inspire me.




I chose similar colours to the bags in the photo for the butterflies and I really liked the way it turned out.  I would never have chosen them myself, so hurray for the challenge!  I also angled the butterflies in the same way as they have with the bags and I have used more and bigger butterflies at the bottom and got smaller and smaller and less and less butterflies as they go up into the sky. I then just used one rhinestone on the biggest butterfly of each colour, to mimic the silver beads on the bags.
I attached them with mini glue dots and lifted the tops of the wings upwards.

Ingredients :
Stamps : none!
Card : white, black, poppy parade, pool party, regal rose, limeade
Ink : none!
Other : big shot, beautiful butterflies, beautiful wings, elegant bouquet ef, rhinestones, vintage wallpaper ef

As this was a card for the whole staff to sign I made it a very big one but I’m sure it could be recreated to make a smaller card with fewer butterflies. I always feel a little stressed making cards on behalf of the school and I wasn’t sure what they had in mind exactly for a teacher’s retirement card, but I found the Irish blessing which I thought was beautiful and all those beautiful butterflies just fit with the blessing perfectly.  I think it was appreciated by everyone.
Please take a look at what the rest of the JAI team have created this week and let the photo inspire you to create something beautiful.

Kathy

Blushing Cherry Ornament

This week at Just Add Ink we have a colour challenge for you.

I have never used this colour combo before and it is just so pretty.

I decided to make another Christmas card to add to my slowly growing collection.
You can’t see it very well in the photo but the cherry cobbler panel that the ribbon is on is embossed with the polka dot embossing folder.  It gives the card more dimension and ties in with the dots on the ornament and the pearls on the elegant bouquet embossed panel.
I used the organza ribbon in a new way on this card.  I had decided that I wanted the ribbon as a band behind the ornament but I wanted to also tie some ribbon to the ornament to kind of “hang it” to the branch.  I tried so many different ribbons, thread and cord, but nothing looked right.  Then I had the idea to cut off the edging of the organza ribbon and try that.  Well it tied beautifully and worked perfectly with the rest of the card.  So I was very pleased with that discovery and I will definitely be using organza that way again  :)

Ingredients :
Stamps : Contempo christmas
Card : white, cherry, in colour dsp hostess stack (ret.)
Ink : cherry
Other : big shot, polka dot ef, elegant bouquet ef, pearls, organza

Please take a look at what the rest of the JAI design team have come up with this week and give these colours a try yourself.

Kathy