Autumn Butterflies - Mrs. A's Butterfly Challenge

Good afternoon & welcome friends. Hope that you're enjoying a lovely afternoon. Today is our DD's birthday. So today has been a day of much reminiscing for DH & me....how blessed we were all these years ago, and neither of us can realize her age! (That's when you REALLY feel old, is when you know your kids are are in middle age. DD might not like to hear that term applied to her however!)

Yesterday afternoon the front porch finally got cleaned...and boy was I tired last evening. Muscles  not used for a while are protesting vigorously. When this post is finished, the back porch is next on the agenda. (thankfully it's much smaller). Next week we'll try to get out some fall decorations on the cleaned porches.

Mrs. A's Butterfly Challenge has an Autumn theme for #15, so I wanted to play along. Have been making some backgrounds using Daler Rowney Pearlescent inks. One of these just needed some butterflies added to meet the requirements (autumn colored butterflies).

Here goes:

-  mixed media weight paper, Hero Arts swirl stamp inked with versamark, heat embossed with  WOW Pearl white EP. Nice resist to color with Daler Rowney Pearlescent colors.

- Pearlescent red, pearl white  were placed with a dropper dispenser in small blogs on craft mat along with another type of yellow acrylic paint since no yellow DR in the supplies as yet. With a fairly wet brush, diluted each small dab of color to dilute, then swiped over embossed resist. Randomly dabbled colors until I liked the effect. Dried, then sprayed an orange Lindy's starburst color- which created some glimmering splats. 

- After drying, a MB butterfly stencil to add texture using embossing paste. (under the 2 lower butterflies, but it's a bit hard to see after adding the dimensional butterflies). This is a pretty stencil pattern, but think it might work better with pan pastels or other inks.

-  some overspray paper (snippet) used to die cut MB butterflies. (The newspaper weight paper comes as packing in craft supply shipments. It's a bit sturdier than tissue paper, but still very thin. Saved to line the air brush desk or a box when spraying. Creates some lovely colors too). Because of the thinness, doubled the paper prior to die cutting each solid & overlay butterfly layer.  Adhered the layers with a tiny bit of Tombow glue. Tiny insect body cut from a snippet of brown c/stock.

- Silhouette cut sentiment cut from white c/s (also a snippet), colored with copic gold marker, then again with a gold gel pen.  (The snippet was a 12x12 c/s from past Silhouette efforts to cut a motif. I'm learning to place the items so that the Silhouette moves past previously cut out places. Because of the calligraphy design of the letters, which were sized down to fit the card, it was tricky removing from the sticky mat.) Still at Baby Steps at learning to use this tool.

- matted against a chocolate brown, then a rust color cardstock. The base card is cream but it looks white in the photo.

Linking to Mrs. A's Butterfly Challenge 15 - Autumn Butterflies and Week 144 at the Snippets Playground.

I'm off to clean so thanks for joining me this afternoon. Do check out Mrs. A's Butterflies and the Snippet Playground. Tons of inspiration for you. Big Hugs.

Edit PS: I keep forgetting to say I've added a new Fall card to the Cards by Friends tab. It's pretty!