Concertina Butterfly

In yesterday's post I showed a card using a concertina (or folded) butterfly, but thought it deserved its own post.  I got the pattern by emailing Shirley at Shirl's Cards.  She's got a video tutorial on how to make the butterflies so I won't go in to that.

I will mention that slicing out the segments in the center is necessary to give it a smaller body.  You really need a score board for this to get the crisp lines and make folding easier.

I don't like things that pop off of cards too much, as that makes them harder to mail, so I tried scoring the wings every 1/8 inch.  Yeah, don't do that.  It becomes too hard to fold down the creases.  1/4 inch works great.  I also found that scoring lines every 1/2" then turning it over and scoring the other lines made folding easier, as you're working with the fold rather than against it half the time (and I didn't try this with the smaller folds, so that could fix the problem there, though my fingers seemed too large to deal with the small folds so maybe kids would have more luck with that).

As a homemade embellishment, it looks pretty cool.

Less is More: Gold

What's this?  Two posts in one day???  Yup.  One of my reasons for starting this craft blog was to encourage myself to enter some of the card challenges on the web.  One I've been following for a while is "Less is More".  You can see the other entries for this challenge here.  I like simple cards (on the whole) so this challenge site seemed well suited to my work.  Anyway, here's my card.

The base is plain white cardstock.  I punched two strips of gold paper using Martha Stewart's Arch Lattice Edge punch and edged a length of white paper with it.  I then cut out an oval of white and an oval of gold, stamped Happy Anniversary (sorry, don't know which company that's from*) and added some sequin hearts and one cut out gold heart.  The concertina butterfly is white cardstock edged in gold marker, scored using my Martha Stewart score board and finished with gold jewelry wire (the stuff designed for beading).  I learned about the concertina butterfly from Shirl's Cards.  She's got a tutorial for how to make them, and will send you the template if you email her.

The card doesn't show it well, but the gold paper is really shiny (Recollections Precious Metals from Michaels).
* The sentiment is from Inkadinkado's wedding clear stamp set (the link goes to Michaels because I couldn't find this set on the Inkadinkado site).