Watercolored Butterflies

I don't know about you, but sometimes it takes me days to make a card. DAYS! I get an idea, try a few variations to see if I can get the idea from my head onto paper, then I walk away, come back and stare at it, walk away again, repeat. When I finally get a clue, it's a beautiful thing.

Here's my card, then I'll explain:

The current Little Tangles challenge is Watercolor:

so I had this idea to use my Neat & Tangled Diamonds background stamp to do an emboss resist. It seemed like a good idea at the time. I made these:

I stamped the Diamonds stamp onto each of piece of water color paper with Versamark ink, then heat-embossed them with white Hero Arts embossing powder. I then taped the edges to frame the stamped image (I like to trim my backgrounds once the water coloring is done).

I then *drum roll, please* opened my new-to-me Kuretake Gansai Tambi watercolors. Yes, I caved, and yes, they are as yummy as you've heard. I applied three ink colors to each piece of water color paper, then went over each one with what I thought was a pearl color, but they call it silver. If you squint, you can see some of the shiny above.

As much as I tried, I couldn't get these backgrounds to work for me on their own, so instead of giving up, I broke out a butterfly die and did this:

which gave me these pretty butterflies:

I kinda like them. :)

My next hurdle was how to use them on a card. See that trellis behind them? I had another hair-brained idea to cut the Memory Box Tessatina Border to make the trellis, and it only took me three or four tries to get it right. The key is to leave the white panel the full 5 1/2" so the die doesn't cut the panel into separate sections.

The next hint is to leave the die stuck to the card stock, then put a piece of tape on the back to help hold all the tiny pieces in place. (I used some Micropore tape, mostly because it's white.) I then carefully poked out the pieces from the die, including the outline, which was stickier than the smaller pieces. It mostly worked. I do like how it adds a bit of texture to the card without any bulk.

A sentiment, a few sequins, and it was done.

Don't you love it when the card in your head mostly works out on paper? :)

I'm off to link up. Thanks for stopping by!

Stuff I used: Miscellaneous sequins, and the following:

InLinkz.com