scenic butterfly - and a giveaway

 A lesson in how to drive yourself nuts here, made worse by my not having cleaned the lovely patchwork butterfly stamp properly!

Inspired by some outline stamps seen recently, I thought I would have a go at using the butterfly in a similar fashion. The stamp was too mucky for me to just ink up the edges and wipe any overspill off with a wipe , so I tried masking the centre of the wings before inking the edges of the stamp and the centre body - after many attempts I got a pair of masks that worked fairly well and gave me a reasonable outline once I removed the masks and stamped the butterfly.

A second mask for the negative image was much easier! Once this was in place, I inked a background into the butterfly frame using distress oxide inks, then stamped the silhouette grasses stamp using black versafine ink, and added some small butterflies from butterfly blush. A quick sponge round the outline and a black matt finished the first off.



The orher two cards used the same technique and stamps but with an extra mask so that I could stamp a background scene as well, using the bridge image from kingfisher song. The base card  for the second card was inked randomly with the butterfly stencil.





I really enjoyed doing these once I got the masks sorted out, but don't  think I will be repeating it any time soon....at least not unless I get a clean stamp.........

Looking at my blog statistics, I have racked up almost 60.00 views for my ramblings, so to celebrate I am having a blog giveaway - if you would like to have either the patchwork butterfly set of stamps or the gothic fragments set, then leave a comment saying which set you would like by the end of June, and I will choose two random names. It would be nice if you followed my blog, but you don't have to!