Butterfly birthday - a pretty book card for a 17 year old girl

This is another birthday card for one of my nieces featuring lots of my favourite techniques.

"Butterfly birthday"

The front cover has a pretty inked background with my favourite distress ink stamping and perfect pearls in the background using some gorgeous meadow stamps.

"Butterfly dimension"

The butterflies are stamped separately onto watercolour paper and acetate using archival ink. The watercolour paper butterflies are coloured with distress inks and a watercolour brush, highlights being added with a white pen. All the butterflies were carefully cut out and adhered to the background with glossy accents. For the butterfly on its side, the two acetate wings are cut out separately from two copies and layered over each other. The wings are carefully shaped by hand and just the edges adhered to the paper layer with glossy accents. It's hard to see in the photos but looks very pretty in real life, you'll just have to trust me ;-)

"Many Happy Returns"

The closure is just a length of lace coloured with distress inks and glued beneath the two inside panels.

"Birdy Decoupage"

Here's a gorgeous decoupage using a free image from the Graphics Fairy. The sentiment is enhanced with a glaze pen (excuse the reflection in the photograph, it reads "Many Happy Returns of the Day"). It's an old-fashioned sentiment that you don't see very often these days, and I never really thought about what it meant when I had cards with this on as a child, but isn't it lovely?

"What's behind the arched window?"

There used to be a programme on the BBC called "Play School" and every day they would have a very short film (some wildlife, or a factory production line or something along those lines) introduced by heading through one of three windows: the round window, the square window or the arched window. This window covers up the book aperture, you have to open it to see what's inside...

"Hello little birdies"

It's another decoupaged Graphics Fairy image :-)

Ingredients:

Artemio stamp set meadow

Artemio stamp set insects

Spellbinders die set: Heartfelt Creations Decorative Chateau Gate HCD718

cardstock: purple 300gsm, white 160gsm

Distress inks: Milled Lavender, Dusty Concorde, Tumbled Glass, Broken China, Chipped Sapphire

Archival ink: Jet Black, Cobalt Blue

Perfect Pearls: Heirloom Gold

printout images from the Graphics Fairy

lace

acetate

adhesives: Pinflair dimensional glue, PVA, glossy accents

Entered for the following challenge:
Simon Says Stamp and Show - Anything Goes
Bunny Zoe's Crafts - Anything Goes
Cupcake Craft - Simply No Design Paper
Joanna Sheen - Happy Birthday
Paper Sundaes - Things with Wings
By the Cute and Girly - Spring is all around
Oozak - Spring Colours
Creative Craft Challenges - Distressed