A is for Apricot & Aperture Butterfly Challenge

Hello & welcome on a lovely sunny Wednesday. I hope that all who celebrated this past weekend as a holiday, had a safe & wonderful time.  DH has been visiting in New England with our best buddy, and is on his way home. They got many projects done & had some fun visiting estate sales, and the famous Brimfield Flea Market. Since someone had to be here to wait on worker folks, I stayed put. For all that's gotten accomplished, I could just as well have gone along. Oh well.

Mrs. A's Butterfly Challenge this time around has the theme of A is for Apricot & Aperture. Since I was a lucky winner of a pretty butterfly die recently, I wanted to be sure to join in with this one. I really struggled with Apricot though! I'd think I had an apricot color and then when I'd really look at it in different lights, was either too orangey or too pinky. Finally decided to try my hand at creating apricot. Did some sponging with some Distress Inks using Iced Lemonade, Abandoned Coral, Spiced Marmalade. Looked ok at first, then it appeared too orange the next time I looked at it. Bought some small Prima paper packs (on sale of course!) that had what looked 'apricot' to my eyes- at first. My final try was to use Koi watercolors and do a wash with a pale orange, with lots of water.

Now my first card was going pretty good...I was pleased with the aperture effect, had the butterfly ready to go, had used Mrs. A's butterfly die cut. Then when the right edge needed to be trimmed just a smidge, disaster struck.

 

 

where the tiny butterflies are placed - the narrow edge of the card tore as I was even-ing up that edge. There's a good amount of adhesive in the layers (the base card, the image in the aperture, the gold frame and the top frame- and it was quite a narrow edge between the cutout & card edge. Yikes, as the rotary blade was cutting, it was shredding & tearing. (Blade had a build up of adhesive from other cuts, which I cleaned after this happened). What to do? Still had all the little bits of the butterflies from the bottom trim, so started adding them at strategic places. Well, it looks sort of dumb, and this card will probably never see an envelope, but there you have it.

 

Striped border is a Simon Says clear stamp, meant for Christmas candy cane stripes. Inked with Delicata Gold, heat embossed with a Silver Pearl, and I think that looks quite nice as a gold striped border! The underlayer of the larger butterflies was the one I'd created trying for apricot. Yeah, it looks way too orange-y when it dried. As I was doing it, my eyes were seeing a nice apricot. Hmph! The overlayer was from a brusho background - and up against the card front, oh my, definitely looks orange!!! The border cut out is from my recent Butterfly win...Thanks Mrs. A.

 

OK...needed to try again, so here's the final card, and I screwed up the first attempt at stamping the flowers...AND was using the mini Misti. Was beginning to think I was not meant to do an Apricot and Aperture card!

 



A created background, with a watercolor wash using Koi w/colors. While still wet, sprinkled Paper Artsy Golden Sands Infusion crystals (much like Brusho crystals). Spritzed some water, and let the piece dry.

- Avery Elle Sweet Scallops oval die cut for the aperture. SU What I Love set to create the layered flowers using Memento inks. (this was my 2nd try...first time the blues I selected were much too dark & also didn't have them placed as well as could be). Tucked in some previously punched Martha Stewart branches.

- MBox butterflies created from the earlier apricot sponging attempt. The overlay was cut with a gold holographic glitter paper. This paper has a plastic backing, which cut nicely with the new metal plate. In fact, I had 2 layers of the paper without realizing, and both layers cut very well.

Was going to leave the sentiment off, but a Brushstroke Hello die (Julie Ebersole, Essentials by Ellen) was waiting to be put in storage. Used that to diecut the greeting from the 1st messup attempt at stamping the flowers. After it was adhered, wondered if this was 'too busy'....but it is what it is, as they say!

I'm off to link up with Challenge #55 Butterflies + A is for Apricot and/or Aperture! Dang! I just realized: didn't have to do BOTH apricot and aperture! Well, I had some adventures anyway!

Thanks for joining me today, and hope that your afternoon goes great. Hugs