March Rudolph Day Challenge

Well here we are at 25th of the month again. I swear these monthly challenges make the time fly even faster. This has been a busy month for me, so I only managed to put one card together this time. I will have to do better than that to meet my schedule of at least a dozen each month! But here it is anyway.

I started with a 15cm, pale blue preformed card from my stash. It had a printed image on it which I covered with white paper passed through my falling snow embossing folder (sorry I don't know the company). The trees are a Marianne die, the deer family is a Memory Box die I won on this challenge some months ago, and the frame is a Go Kreate 'frilly circles' die (Not a very apt name but I like the shape!). The sentiment was a file in my Silhouette cameo library which I cut using the same cards as the trees and the smaller deer. I finished it off with some glitter glue on the trees, which changed colour because it was on dark card!, and a few holographic snowflake stickers. The left hand tree and snowflake above it are just about hiding a join in the background paper because my embossing folder wasn't wide enough!

So I will link this up with the Rudolph Day Challenge over on Scraps of life by Scrappy Mo, and perhaps I had better start making some for April now.

A mint green butterfly challenge

Despite my good intentions, I did not manage to enter the last Butterfly Challenge. But when I saw the new challenge I was determined to have a go. The challenge is to use a butterfly combined with E for edges, and/or the colour mint green. Well mint green is a colour I use a lot both in my clothing and in my craft, so I was happy use that.

I am currently trying to make a few items for a charity stall at a coffee morning at the end of the month, and a couple of weeks ago I saw a project on Dreaming Tree that I wanted to try. So I purchased the cutting file which was for a paper sculpture designed to fit in a 12" square shadow box frame. We cannot buy these in my area of Spain, so my sister bought four frames and posted them to me, but I chose to work with 8" frames instead. So I resized the files and cut them out using my Silhouette Cameo machine. I chose mint green card for the background and had made the first one ready to be framed when the parcel arrived. (Sorry it is hard to get a photo of something behind glass, so there is some reflection distortion on the left side).

The first layer of white is cut twice and the two parts are glued together for added strength, and mounted onto the background with foam tape. Then the decoupage layer is cut and shaped, and mounted onto the base. I added a few iridescent and pale green gems to add some sparkle. As you can see from the picture, I downsized the file a touch too much because I did it before the frames arrived. I would have preferred it if the white outer edge had met the frame with no green showing, but I intend to make this again with probably a pink background so I will do better next time!

Then I resized the files again to fit on a 6" square card. This time I only cut the lower layer once and glued it directly onto a mint base card. I added the decoupage layers and some gems as in the picture, but using pearls instead of gems on the butterflies. Then I used a Joanna Sheen signature die to cut "Happy birthday" from a snippet of the card and covered it with glossy accents to make it pop a little more. I glued it where  the background was flat. The picture is protected by the glass, but I put a little silicone glue under the butterflies' wings on the card to save it losing all its dimension in the post. So here is the card.

I was pleased with how well this smaller file cut from card. I think the new Premium blades for the cameo are a big improvement. here is a little picture of the two items together so you can see there really is quite a difference in their size.

So now I will link this up with Butterfly Challenge#74: Mint green (I can't really call a wooden frame an edge so I will just go with the colour this time),

and Double "D" Challenges: Things that fly.