One image; Two takes

Last week I made two cards for men, so this week  it is the turn of the ladies. I had someone in mind when I made the  first one. Once again I was browsing the All Things Silhouette Facebook page which is a great source of inspiration for me. and I came across an image called 'Rainbow hair' that I knew I had to try.

 A lady called 'La Isla Eva' had kindly posted the cutting file for it, so I opened it up and had a play around with it. I down sized it a bit, and having separated all the elements, I then grouped them to use with different colours. I raided my newest snippets box - off-cuts of vinyl -  and found pieces that all went together quite well, including a small piece of black for the head. I then moved each group of elements to a different area of the cutting mat on the screen, and used the grid lines on the actual sticky mat to place my pieces of coloured vinyl. Then I cut it all out. I used transfer tape to lift each section and place it onto a white A5 landscape card. This left too much white space for me so I used some black sparkle vinyl to cut two lengths of trellis using a Memory Box die, and stuck one down each side of the card. I made two butterflies by covering a small piece of white card with some really tiny left over pieces of coloured vinyl and die cutting two solid butterflies. I then used some more of the black sparkle vinyl to cut two of the matching fancy butterflies and stuck these over the coloured ones. I added one to each trellis and then cut three sizes of little flowers again from left over pieces of vinyl, using an old border punch. and dotted these randomly on the trellis. Finally one more piece of black sparkle was used to die cut the Happy Birthday using a Britannia die, and as I had three left over flowers, I added these to the sentiment. The birthday girl is celebrating today, so I can now show her card which she loves.

I wanted to do something else with this lovely image so I made it a little smaller and cut it again from a sheet of Silhouette double sided adhesive. This proved to be a disaster as the bottom layer of protective paper stuck to my new, very sticky, cutting mat, and the top layer of protective paper was too easy to remove and wouldn't lift with the sticky film attached. So the first attempt was a write off! But I didn't want to give up too soon, so I cut it a second time, and then I cut it from my pearl paper to make a mask. With this glued in place on a piece of white card, I was able to lift the elements one at a time and place them through the mask. It had been my intention to use gilding flakes, but when I was looking through a drawer to find them, I came across a roll of tonertex film, bought at a craft show at least ten years ago and never used! I don't even know if you can still buy it. Anyway, there was sheet in the roll that was a random pattern of colours and I decided to use that instead of the gilding flakes. Because the little sticky elements were catching on the mask I needed to lift the mask regularly and colour a section of it so it was no longer sticky. I didn't do a very accurate job of placing  it back each time, so my completed image had rather a large gap below the lower hair area and the neck, so I cut a few extra pieces to fill this. I again cut the head from black vinyl.

This time I used the base card in the portrait orientation, and I used a SU Everything Eleanor stamp and versafine ink to add a swirl in the lower right corner of the card and along the top, and embossed these with my favourite disco black embossing powder which had bright glitter in it. Then I matted the main image on to silver holographic card coloured with black alcohol ink, and mounted it over the swirls. I used an off-cut of the adhesive film on white card and what was left of the tonertex sheet to cut a butterfly as above, and added a black fancy one over it. After rummaging around I found some shiny 'plastic' flowers and added these to the swirls. A sparkly black die-cut Happy Birthday completed this one. I am sorry the photo is not very good. I took this one in artificial light.

As I used so many offcuts of vinyl I am linking these to Pixies Snippets Playground, and the second card also meets the criteria for Mrs A'S Butterfly Challenge 8. This month we are playing Bingo and I have used the row, Wet embossing, butterfly and flowers.