Friendship and a Butterfly or two

Good morning, today I am posting over at the Chocolate Baroque blog, all are samples from Lesley's Hochanda shows which celebrated Chocolate Baroque's first Birthday with the channel when viewers were treated to some wonderful new floral stamps and colouring pages.

Further down I have also added an extra card as my entry into the current Butterfly Challenge, of course it's a CB image!

This release was right up my street and I have to say I thoroughly enjoyed making these samples and it was only time that prevented me making more. Details of all the stamps used have direct links to the product on the CB website if I have tempted you.

So to my first card at the top uses the beautiful Medici Flower. On this occasion I only wanted to use the focal flower so I used sticky notes to cover the areas around the flower, inked it with Versafine Black, removed the masks and followed the same process three times. I then masked the  individual stamped flowers and stamped the Poppy heads from Poppy Meadow along with a inspirational quote from Pretty Poppies. Next I flicked some watery distress ink onto the white space and finally coloured the blooms with sparkle pens.

I really love this image, it's called Mosaic Flower but to me it yells out Chinese Lanterns. I stamped the image with Versamark and heat embossed with detail gold powder, coloured the flower hears with pencils and rubbed some gilding wax around the edges. Some twine and a button tied around before matting onto a pieced of corrugated and then the base card.

I painted this little box with acrylic and shimmer paints, then used a stencil and texture paste to add some flourishes. When dry I used a slightly darker pain to highlight the stenciled patterns and added gilding flakes here are there and along the opening edges. The flowers on the top were cut from one of the colouring pages, coloured in with pencils and fixed to the top along with some die cut leaves.

My final share today used the new Floral Delight stamp which I stamped once, masked and then stamped part of the stamp a second time and coloured in with pencils.  Using a mask I added some sun rays and stamped three of the words from Wish Flower, cut out and added individually to the finished piece.  

And I found this lurking in my CB folder and I think it should fit in OK over at the current Butterfly Challenge selecting the colour cream from the spinning wheel. I know, I don't enter for weeks and then twice in the same fortnight, but it's one of only a couple of challenges I ever enter and I would hate for it to fold due to lack of support and people shifting over to the 'quick fix' social media options. I know from personal experience that it takes a great deal of time and effort to keep a challenge running so I hope more of you will pop over and join in the fun. Valery Anne even offers prizes and that's something that doesn't happen at all challenges these days.

For this card I stamped the beautiful Summer Fayre stamp onto Fabriano using Distress Ink and simply dragged out some of the colour. I then stamped the Butterflies a second time, this time dragging out a little more colour and decoupaged them

Thank you so much for popping in today.