Welcome to my crafty blog. Today’s card is looking ahead to summer (I know spring’s only just arrived in the UK!) but I couldn’t resist these beautiful butterflies from Julie Hickey’s ‘layering flutterbies’ set. They come with co-ordinating dies, but I’ve chosen to use just the largest and smallest of the butterfly stamps. I wouldn’t normally have green as a dominant colour on my cards, either, but this week’s challenge at Color Throwdown puts it front and centre

I started with a square of white card, cut to fit onto a 6×6 card blank, and stamped the butteflies using WOW clear embossing ink. I then heat embossed them with WOW’s ‘gold metallic’ superfine powder – you can get such fantastic detail on images with these powders.

Next step was to surround the butterflies with green dots to make the images stand out. I learned this technique at an online class with Julie Hickey herself last year – it’s so easy but really effective. All you need is a couple of marker pens (I used Sharpies in dark and light green) – start with the darker colour nearer the image and just ‘dot, dot, dot’. The trick is to space the dots out as you move away from the image, and then add the lighter shade once you’ve got the darker surround done. I tried to follow the butterfly shape as well, so it wasn’t just a big blob of dots around them!

All I then needed to do was add the sentiment – this one if from Julie Hickey’s ‘positive wishes’ set, and I again embossed it with the gold WOW powder.

Once done, the topper then went onto the card blank and it was finished! I do like this technique – it works with lots of different images and is so simple to do.