Butterfly Beautiful

I was asked recently to create a Thank You gift for a woman who loves butterflies. Immediately I thought of using 'All a Flutter' (from the Summer Mini) and casing an idea I had seen on Splitcoast Stampers a while ago that caught my eye.
I wanted 2 butterflies for each card and one for the card holder so I stamped them with Basic Grey ink (my stock standard version of "black") on water colour paper and began the process of colouring each one in.

My experience at water colouring is quite limited but I am thrilled with how these winged wonders turned out.

The next step was to stamp the background and sponge the edges to give them an aged look. Because I cut the water coloured butterflies out, I needed to stamp the image on the background so I could get antennas. To do this I stamped the image on a scrap piece of card stock and cut them out. I adhered them to the background piece where I wanted my butterflies to go and then stamped my background image. I did this for each card and two of them were less successful than the others, but thats what you get with hand crafted masterpieces right?!
Now it was just a matter of matting my pieces and adhering them to their bases. Simple!
I love how the butterflies seem to float above their backgrounds.
This is the finished product ... simply Butterfly Beautiful!