Butterfly, Butterfly.....

Something so special about butterflies, don't you think? In the crafting world they tend to be used mainly as embellishments, little accents to set off a design.  Lots of colours, layers, pretty, sparkly, beautiful.

I have always had a bit of 'a thing' for shaped cards.  know I have made butterfly shaped cards in the past and they have always been well received by the recipients. So I thought it was time to revisit the shaped butterfly card.

I've always been a very 'hands on' crafter, getting blisters because I'd fight with heavy cardstock and scissors or craft knife to hand cut my designs.  Nothing wrong with that and I can spend many hours just cutting.  But recently I bought a new little toy, having always shied away from the electric cutters in the past, I realised that actually, there was no reason why I couldn't bring this technique into my crafting.  So here is the Butterfly Card that I made with the help of my new little toy, the Cricut Mini.

There are 5 to 6 layers of quality card, textured card and designer papers that make up this beautiful butterfly, I took inspiration from some beautiful Purple Corded paper I espied on the Papermill Direct website, it was a limited edition and I just HAD to have it!!  I think it added a lovely texture and rich colour to the Pink & Purple theme, and it cut extremely well on the cricut, using the 'medium cardstock' setting, I could have tried the light setting but I thought the lovely deep corded effect would cut better on the medium setting and it did, first time!! The card didn't really need lots of patterned paper, so I settled on a subtle design from a 'First Edition' paper pad for the top layer.  Added accents of stickles glitter in 'Star Dust' and delicate faux half pearls to provide the finishing touches.  This design and colourway has been very popular with my customers, I should make more but at the moment I'm selfishly keeping the remainder of that purple corded for myself, for those moments when you just NEED to stroke paper, and besides it's purple!!  did I mention it was purple?  :-D

Materials Used:
Purple Corded paper  - Papermill Direct
Birdsong 8x8 pad  - First Edition
Pink Bazzill Cardstock
White Card & white Pearlescent paper from own stash
StarDust - Stickles Glitter glue
Self Adheshive Faux pearls

Tools Used:
Cricut Mini- Provocraft