Butterfly Gala

As the weather has been superb this week, Mr L and I have been spending quite a lot of time out in the garden and in greenhouse, sowing vegetable and flower seeds.  I love the potential of this time of year; the bright green buds of new leaf growth, tiny new shoots emerging through the soil together with the amazing colour variety of spring flowers.  The insects are also emerging.  It’s lovely to see lots of bees and butterflies flying around, although our pussy cats’ favourite game at the moment is catching (and eating – gross!) butterflies, much to my chargrin.  To compensate for our cats’ antisocial behaviour, I have sown a multitude of flowers that are attractive to butterflies and bees, providing lots nectar and pollen for them.  It’s the least I can do!

Butterflies are the subject of my cards this week, using the Stampin’ Up! Butterfly Gala stamp and accompanying punch and the Crackle Paint background stamp.

I began by stamping and punching out the butterflies.  I like to add odd numbered accents to my card so I used 2 large and 1 small butterfly for each card.  My colour themes were to be monochrome and pink/white/black so I used Lovely Lipstick ink and a Wink of Stella brush to colour one set of butterflies and the Wink of Stella by itself for the other set.

Once coloured in, I mounted each butterfly onto a Basic Black or Lovely Lipstick foil background, adhering only the body section so that the wings could be gently folded up to provide some 3D interest.

The background pieces were stamped using the Crackle Paint stamp using black ink.  The sentiments are from Butterfly Gala and Forever Lovely and cut out using the stitched rectangle framelits and the Pretty Label punch.  To complete the butterflies, I added some gemstones for the heads.

Here’s the Lovely Lipstick version….

….and the monochrome version.