A Happy Stamper

Last week I had a wonderful surprise when I won four plates of fabulous Chocolate  Baroque stamps which were offered as fantastic blog candy to coincide with the launch of their new stamps.They are really lovely stamps with lots of beautiful curly swirly designs, a pair of little owls, and some butterflies, and one set is of carousel horses and funfair elements.When they arrived on Friday I couldn't wait to have a play with them, but of course they needed to be cut out and mounted first so I spent the afternoon doing just that. So when Saturday afternoon came and my husband had gone out to his game of bowls I got my opportunity play.I made two cards,  one with the owls here,  the other one
 with the butterflies for my sisters' birthday this week. I started by stamping the butterflies with with a Marvy Blending Blox ink pad in shades of brown to give a variegated effect.I decided not to colour it but added some glitter to the edges of the wings with a glue pen and ultrafine glitter. Then I cut round it and trimmed the corners with a pair of corner scissors and sponged some colour from the same ink pad around the edge and matted it onto brown pearlised paper. I found some pretty Artylicious background paper and selected the area I wanted and cut it to fit my pearlised turquoise card leaving a narrow border, and then overstamped it with some of the lovely swirly, leafy parts of another stamp from the set. I fixed it to the base card and and then the butterfly panel toward the top right hand side, and added a small turquoise gemstone to three of the corners, for the forth corner I had another new product ( Kraft Glassine )that I was keen to try out. It is a coated kind of brown paper that looks waxy but is apparently not wax . It keeps it's shape when scrunched up and can be coloured with inks, sprays and Perfect Pearl mica powders which then have to be heat set and become sort of incorporated into the paper.It can also be printed in an inkjet printer and heat set in the same way. Any way because it holds it's shape it is perfect for making flowers. I cut two sizes of scalloped rounds with nestie dies, several layers, and the same with bright blue tissue paper, and then screwed them up. I coloured the kraft glassine ones with Tumbled Glass Distress Ink and some turquoise mica powder,(not actually Perfect Pearls but it must have been one one with the right kind of fixative in because it worked all right,) and heated it with my heat tool to set the colour.

I alternated the glassine layers with the tissue paper ones and fixed them together with a flower shaped brad. I didn't have one that matched very well so I stuck this flower gem over the top. I cut the leaf  spray from kraft glassine with a Sissix die and coloured it in the same way as the flower and attached it to the remaining corner. I am entering this card in The Stamp Man Fortnightly Challenge: Butterflies and Dragonflies.