Butterflies for two lovely ladies.

I mentioned in a previous post that I had been busy making cards that I couldn't yet show on my blog. Well both my sister and lovely daughter-in-law had birthdays last week, so here are the cards I made for them.

Firstly my sister Jean, who many of you have met in blogland already. We are as different as chalk and cheese, but we get on so well now. We are both crafters, and we both love stamping, distressing, die-cutting and colouring, but our styles are very different. Whereas I am a tad slap-dash, a bit heavy-handed with inks and paints, and I have no set style that is 'me', Jean is a careful worker who produces beautiful pastel creations, often with the dreaded white space that I just can't handle, and I recognise her work because she does have her own style. (You can see some of her lovely work on her blog here. I'm sure she'd like you to visit). All this makes producing a card for her quite difficult. But one thing I dabble in that she doesn't do, is parchment craft, so I thought that's what I'd use for her card. This was our project at my monthly class in June. It was our introduction to colouring on parchment. Our class runs from 10.30 in the morning until 4.00 but even so, we all went home with our card unfinished. However I decided to use mine, so I layered up the main panels, but that left me with a fairly empty space on the left hand side that I didn't like. So I traced and coloured another butterfly on to  a small off-cut of parchment, cut it out, and glued it to the empty panel. The panel was already attached to the card so it was too late to emboss a sentiment as this has to be done from the reverse side, so I coloured a peel-off with a purple permanent marker and used that. I have a long way to go with this technique but I knew Jean would accept my shortcomings.

My daughter-in-law has two great loves, butterflies and the colour purple. When Chocolate Baroque released their plate of stamps - Punky Romance - I knew this was the perfect image for her. My son is a vicar, and Jo manages to fulfil the demanding role of being a vicar's wife, alongside being a mum of three lovely children and a teaching assistant, and still maintains her rather quirky, individual style. I recently bought some pan pastels so I decided to try them out to make the background, using a tint and shade in purple. They did blend easily but I could do with some card with a bit more 'tooth' as I found that when I burnished it with a paper towel, I took a lot of the colour off again. I cut the background to fit a purple square base card, and used my Memento Paris Dusk pad to stamp the image in the corner. I added some more pastels to the spare card to darken it and re-stamped the cogs, large butterfly and flowers, cut them out, and used silicon glue to add them to the main image. I added a small gem to the centre of each flower and some purple stickles sparkle to the butterfly wings. Next I printed out the quote by Dr Seuss that fits Jo so well, cut it out with my Silhouette machine, and glued it to the right hand side of the card. Finally I added a little green butterfly made with a lovely cut and emboss folder recently purchased from Stampin'up.

The jury is still out on the Pan pastels. I liked them for the background, but can't see me doing much detailed work with them. But I haven't really given them a fair trial yet.

I am entering the second card in the following challenges;

Crafty Catz Challenge 142: Monochromatic.

Fat Pages and Cards with Attitude 18: anything goes, and

Inspire me Fridays: Anything goes.