MFP December Blog Hop Part #1, Day #3 - Butterfly Essense

Mark's Finest Papers December Preview, Week 1

This month's New Stamp Set Releases are

 Featured December 3 Lots of Words

Featured December 4 Mini Swallowtail

Featured December 5 Butterfly Essence

Please hop along with us! You have a chance to win one of the above stamp sets! Just comment on the following blogs (don't forget this one), each day for more chances to win! (You do NOT have to comment on all the blogs each day! The names are drawn randomly!) All three winners will be announced on Dec. 14, 2013 on the Mark's Finest Papers blog. You can go back and comment if you missed a day. (HINT: The more you comment, the more chances you have to win and comments on the MFP blog count twice!) The deadline for commenting is 10 PM EST on Friday Dec.. 13, 2013.

Welcome to the first part of the December Mark's Finest Papers blog hop!  I'll explain a little more what's happening later, but first lets get to the stamps and cards!

Today's stamp is the first of our main four, and is called "Butterfly Essence".

I have to admit that while I like the occasional butterfly, I'm not as big a fan as some people I know. So when I saw this set I at first had no idea what I was going to do.  As it turns out I came up with some of my favourite cards this month.

I started by stamping and embossing the large image, then adding a hint of colour by lightly shading with some pastel pencil crayons.  I then added some glitter gel pen to a few of the butteflies.  I trimmed three sides of the image to the size I wanted and fussy cut the top edge before assembing everything together.  I ended up with a fun note card where I can stamp the inside later if I want or just write a sentiment.  

I love white embossed on velum so I started with that and built the card around that.  I was able to pop up the velum by adding pop dots under the image, sometimes trimming them to size.  From the front you can't even tell!  

I also decorated the inside but you can unfortuantely see a bit of an error I made. I've been using a Tombow vellum adhesive tape runner which I find works really well, accept I don't usually use such dark card stock with it and didn't realize the adhesive would show.  Oh well, live and learn!  Its still pretty.  :)

Thats it for my cards today.  Just to explain a bit about what we are doing this month, instead of having one long blog hop, we've decided to break the team into two, and spread the hop over two weeks. This week the first half of the design team will focus on the first half of the stamps, and the second half of the team will focus on the second half of the stamps next week on December 10, 11, and 12.  Those of us not participating in the hop will be making cards to showcase on the main blog.  So in addition to hopping along, make sure you have a look at the Mark's Finest Papers blog to ensure you don't miss out on any inspiration opportunties!  :)

Here are the design team members hopping this week:

Guest Designer - Kelli Jo

Patty

 Jane C

 Thrfity Stamper

Marilynn 

Cathy C  (Thats me!)

Sue W

An'Jenic

  Amy

Marks Finest Papers, a Heinrich Co.

See you at the Mark's Finest Papers blog on December 10th for the start of part #2! :)