Hello again crafters. Don’t you just love the world of paper crafting. We are blessed to have so many talented and professional craft experts out there to inspire us. There’s never a dull moment in a crafter’s life. I’m constantly adding new materials to my stash having seen them in use on the various craft channels, at craft shows and on the internet. During  lull in my card orders I set about having a play with some of my stash. I had no agenda but wanted to play with some pearl spritzing inks and also the latest of my many butterfly die acquisitions, namely the Sizzix Tim Holtz Detailed butterfly dies.

I started with an A4 sheet of white card/ I applied various colours of distress inks in shade of blue. Next I had a good old spritz with Docrafts Artiste spritzing inks in white, haematite, electric blue and black night. Then, I ran the whole sheet of card through my Xcut A4 Delicate flourishes embossing folder and applied some Tim Holtz Black Soot distress ink over the embossing. Then I dripped some of the spritzing inks over the top (I unscrewed the spray and just let it drip onto my card). I also added some splats of ink from a clear Spectrum Noir Sparkle pen for extra sparkle.

I then cut my finished background into 4 A6 pieces. I used the outline dies from the Sizzix Tim Holtz Detailed butterfly die set to cut 2 butterflies out (I’ve kept these to use on other cards. I then matted the card onto plain black card stock and dry embossed through the details part of the detailed butterfly die. I used usArtQuest pearlescent and metallic watercolour paints in shades of blue to paint the embossed wing detail onto the black card. I then die cut the detailed butterflies in plain black card stock and added extra highlights with the same watercolour paints and glued them in place in the previously cut spaces. I used small black foam squares to eleveate the wings slightly to add more dimension.

Having now made 4 toppers, I needed to make them into cards. I found a pack of Forever friends special finish card blanks, some of which were letter-pressed in black and looked perfect, apart from the fact that they were cream & black. So I got out the same distress inks I’d used for the background and coloured them to match.

And here they are, they all look the same but look closer and you’ll see each one is different. There were two butterflies in the die set, two cards have one of each butterfly on them and the other two have two identical ones on them. Hope you like them. I Had a fab time creating them and as a by-product now have 8 lovely butterflies left use on other cards.