Butterflies and trellises!

Welcome to Eureka's July bloghop!  We have a brand new design team with lots of talented ladies!  You should have arrived here from Sarah V's blog; if not, and you'd like to go through the hop from the beginning, then head over to QKR Stampede!

I purchased a new punch last week, and decided to have fun stamping on the punch-out itself.  I thought if I stamped my design on the trellis itself, it would be an amazing effect.   I'll be honest, it didn't work quite the way I hoped, but it was a lot of fun, and I have a good idea now of what works and what does not.   I spent all day playing with the ideas, and I've decided I might as well share what didn't work as well as what did, so perhaps someone will spend more time being successful.  I hope if you do come up with some ideas, you'll share them with me!

One reason that I picked the butterfly background stamp is that it is one of my favorites, and it was a pert I wanted to find a way to use it without having to spend a lot of time coloring (though as you'll see, I did color a couple of panels).  I am much more of a crafter than an artist, so coloring is not my strong point.  In fact, it was very rare when my children were little that I could bring myself to color with them ... I think the trauma of being the last kid in elementary school to be able to color inside the lines has never quite left me!  :-)  Anyway, between my permanent setting on "slow" for cardmaking, and near-paralysis in choosing what colors to use, I liked the idea of a quicker card with the image! 

It's pretty obvious in looking at the first two cards how they were created.  I'll just add that when punching the image, be sure to have trimmed off about 3/16ths of an inch of the image before punching, unless you want it flush with the edge of the card.  If you are a little shaky as I am with my hands,  you might want to use temporary bond glue when matching the punched trellis to the panel (and I did not trim the ends separately; I trimmed the whole thing together after attaching).  I then gently lifted the edges to add a more permanent bond. 

For the purple card, I traced the edge of the trellis onto the vellum, then trimmed it.  For the second card, I overlapped the blessings text to make it pop out a little more, and pull it all together.  In this card, the raised look of the trellis, which doesn't really show in this photo, is really nice.

The third card is a single panel like the other two cards; I cut one inch strips of vellum and glued them to the back of the trellises before attaching to the panel.  My new punch is flawed, and will not cut the strips straight, but happily, using white on white, it does not show.  I thought of this idea last minute, and with only an hour before sunset to take the picture for this hop, I have it only temporarily bonded here, and promptly disassembled after taking the photo so the glue can set better.  This is always important to do with a card, but especially when working with vellum.  We'll see what I really end up doing with it after the glued panels have cured!

The pictures down below are from my playing around with various ideas.  At first, I didn't think stamped on trellises looked good uncolored, so I started coloring them.  I didn't finish coloring, though, as I suddenly realized my punch was crooked, and I would not have been able to use these particular trellises, but I still thought it might be beneficial to  see how well combinations of cardstock colors, colored trellises, backgrounds, etc, could look.  It was funny after all my efforts with the trellises, that what looks best, at least to me, is just a plain old trellis over the design!  What do you think?

1. With the blank background, it's not easy to recognize the butterflies.   It's a little  hard to tell here, but the design is actually more discernable where the butterflies are not colored!

 2.  Here I just layed a colored trellis over the colored panel.  Although the two were colored differently, it gives you a sense of how it would look.  (Too busy/redundant, I would not make a card with this.  I tried (did not take a picture) putting vellum underneath, but it was equally unimpressive).

3. This is colored trellis over b/w panel.  Best by far, but not enough to make me want to finish a card with this option.

4.   The butterfly pattern is much more discernible this way when placed on a color; the darker the color, the more it stands out.  If I liked coloring more, I'd redo the trellises and make a card.

 

5.  And here we have the plain trellis ... much less bother (er, except for the lengthy coloring time!) and much classier!  :-)

Thanks for stopping! Now hop on over to Suzee's place to see what she has done!