From Places Abroad - Tunisia (Altenew Challenge)

Good morning! I totally fell in love with the Altenew Challenge inspiration photo this month and was happy to find a little more time to play along! This was the first card I posted earlier this month:

And here are today’s cards:

As I mentioned in my post for A Blog Named Hero yesterday I LOVE the Hero Arts Glorious Petal stencil. It has gorgeous detail and a fabulous design. When I was working on yesterday’s card I realized that the stencil would work beautifully for the Altenew challenge. For the ABNH card I went for a subtle and sparkly tone-on-tone design with the stencil but for these cards I wanted something that would really pop!

I started off by taping the stencil onto a piece of dark blue cardstock. I applied texture paste evenly across the stencil and then peeled it off. While it was still wet I sprinkled Glitter Ritz Microfine glitter in Harvest Gold across the wet paste and knocked off the excess. I did two panels, centering the stencils in slightly different areas for each card. After they were glittered I set them aside to dry and worked on my butterflies.

I stamped the first layer of the Altenew Painted Butterflies with Mama Elephant pigment ink in Rainwater and used my heat gun to set the ink. The next layer was stamped with Mama Elephant pigment ink in Stargazer. I wanted to use embossing powder for the final layer so I heated the pigment ink carefully so that it wouldn’t catch any embossing powder. I stamped the final layer in Versamark and then sprinkled it with Ranger Platinum embossing powder which is a gorgeous champagne gold. I stamped the sentiment from Altenew’s Label Love with the same pigment ink in Rainwater and then sprinkled it with clear embossing powder. I set that with my heat gun and then fussy cut the butterflies and the sentiments.

To assemble the card I trimmed a half inch off the top and bottom of the stenciled panel and adhered it to a top-folding A2 cardbase of white cardstock. Then I added a tangle of turquoise and metallic gold thread to the card and adhered the butterfly and sentiment with foam mounting tape which effectively holds the thread down.