Butterfly, Flutterby

I was still playing with Parchment paper when I made my card for the Daring Cardmakers dare this week.

Butterfly, Flutterby

Hi everyone, Jo here with this week's dare....
I seem to like butterflies at the mo. This week therefore I would like you to put some butterflies on cards. Stitched, felt, shiny, bright, plain, paper pieced, stamped, drawn... you get the idea :) any theme of card but it must have a butterfly somewhere on the card!

I decided to go with a card design that I’ve made several times before, mainly because I love this particular stencil. It’s by a lady called Erica Fortgens and combines embossing and stitchinG

I started by dry embossing the panel onto some thick, good quality parchment paper. You can emboss brass stencils perfectly well with a lot of the die cutting machines out there but it doesn’t work on this stencil because it has butterflies in two of the corners and birds in the other two. I wanted the butterflies in all four corners so it meant that the embossing had to be done the conventional way.
Once all the embossing was finished I took a needle, pierced all the holes and stitched the edging of the oval and the butterflies with fine gold thread and added small pearls for the butterflies bodies.
The three tags were printed onto Parchment paper on my computer and then embossed with gold embossing powder but you have to be really quick to do. If your not, the ink dries and the embossing powder won’t stick to it. The two name tags were cut using a ‘Whale of a Punch’ and the other was cut by hand and then all three were mounted on a slightly larger tag cut from pearlescent card, also by hand.

Finally, the whole thing was assembled onto an ivory pearlescent card using tiny gold brads and ivory ribbons.