Butterfly Card and experimenting

I seemed to have lost my moo yesterday.  The weather was very grey, and at this time of year I tend to be a bit down as my Wedding Anniversary is in a few days, and I miss my husband most then.  However I knew I had a card to make ..... but I had a little play anyway.

This DaliART butterfly stamps were in the front of my stamp box , so I thought I would use that.   I also have some John Next Door Media Plates (sort of gelli plates), which I had only played with in my art journal - so one of those  came out as well.

I placed the media plate on my stamping platform and inked it with a brayer and Izink Sky blue pigment ink.  I then took one of the little butterflies from the collection and stamped it into the ink on the media plate to remove the colour.  The result was a border with butterflies.  I then applied clear embossing powder and heated this up.

I then stamped the large butterfly with black Nuvo ink (again using the stamping platform - where would we be without this - it makes life so much easier).

As I was watching a demo on Spectrum Noir Metallic Pens, I decided to get mine out and colour the butterfly with them.  I can see from the photo that my colouring is not what it used to be.   I do struggle to see to do this nowadays (roll on the new glasses next month).   Tiz a shame as I love colouring.  However, although the colouring looks dodgy in the photo, it looks ok on the card - or at least I think so!

I did a few highlights with a fine white Gelly Roll pen, and then when the image was dry I damped it with a wet paintbrush and applied some more clear embossing powder.  (This was a bit of an experiment as although I have done this before on MDF with Ultra Thick Embossing powder, I had never done it with fine detail powder - Thankfully it worked!)

I still wasn't quite happy with the effect so I edged around the blue frame with a little Nuvo glue and sprinkled on some Cosmic Shimmer Glitter Jewels - yes I liked that.  However, as you can see from the picture of the card (below) before I got to colouring it - I hadn't quite got the frame centred on the card.   Undaunted I got out my picot edge dies from Clarity Stamp, and cut the whole thing out, and edged the pico with more of the Sky Blue Ink.

Happy at last I then mounted it on a new card - and there you have it - the finished card (above)..

The start of the card, and the dodgy alignment of the square boarder!
(you can just abo9ut see the reflection of the embossing)

I created an insert in Craft Artist - with just a simple message in it saying "Fluttering by to wish you a very Happy Birthday.