And two more...

Set me as a seal, upon your heart...

Is this a romantic scripture, or is this more about our relationship with God? I guess that depends on your interpretation of the book of Solomon. I think it can be used either way, and so two of these I put under the "love" category of my cards in the places in which I sell, and two in the "scripture" section. :-) I'll post the other two tomorrow.

The black floral panel was stamped using opalite inks. They are a little more subtle than this picture shows them to be, but it is still really pretty; I love using these inks! But they will not show up very well if you are using anything other than a very black black. I have some blacks that are not quite as dark, and I've been disappointed with the look of the inks.

Horse card

Friends of ours have a recycling business, and at there annual sale, I picked up a roll of super thin wood laminate. It's easy to cut with scissors, and will run through a cuttlebug (though is rather fragile, so pieces of the laminate will sometimes break.

Reconstruction

Some months back I started pulling out cards that I really did not like, but didn't really want to keep working on. This is one of them. Opalite never scans or photographs really well, but frankly, this card didn't look any better than the photo. The butterfly was the worst part; I had used pearlescent powders, which normally have a nice sheen, but somehow failed to here.

I ended up keeping only background. I embossed the background image a few more times on mica cardstocks, and punched out the butterflies from it.

Butterfly notecards

My oldest daughter loves butterflies, and so I began purchasing butterfly stamps to make cards for her. I was delighted to find this text stamp and the two butterflies that went with it. Originally I was going to emboss with gold and color in, but I realized that would be too much effort for simple notecards! I had some fun foam from a craft project for Children's Church years ago, and a bunch of wood blocks. So, I stamped each butterfly onto the fun foam, intentionally over-cut the image, and used double sided tape to affix them to wooden blocks. Then I used multi-shaded stamp pads for color. I colored in the bodies and antennae with markers.

Horse card set

I know, "horse" doesn't say much, but then, I don't really know anything about horses. In fact, I was so sure that the coloring was wrong that I brought one of the cards to a friend of mine who owns horses, sure she would tell me it was off. Fortunately, she told me that it was just fine, that there are horses that light colored. Whew! I'd done a sample image first, but didn't realize how much darker that particular cardstock was than the one I ended up using for the card set, so was very surprised as I finished coloring to see this shade.