Dining View page

For this page about the abundance of butterflies on our zinnias this year, I tried a few different things.  Some worked for me and some didn't:

• The butterflies are cut with the Cricut and the Storybook cartridge.  I cut a slightly smaller individual butterfly in white paper to go with the black border butterfly on the left.  I inked the white butterfly thoroughly in Versamark and then applied pastels working from the center out.  It was a little too much contrast so I went over it with a black swirl stamp.  This is similar to a pretty butterfly card in the SU! catalog. 
• For the journaling, I tried a technique frequently seen in scrapbook magazines.  Apply some paint.  After it dries, write the journaling on over the painted area.  I liked this although I have a terrible time keeping my writing straight :-(  I didn't want to draw in writing lines because I thought they would be hard to erase off the paint.  Maybe next time I'll stamp a journaling block over the painted area, but I'll definitely do this one again.
• The little black butterflies help balance the layout and cover up a place I smeared the photo when pulling it off the printer.
• 'view' is American Crafts Dear Lizzy vinyl puffy stickers and I love them!  More of these for sure.
• Probably the biggest thing on this layout I hadn't done in a very long time is to use a single piece of designer paper for the background and not break it up with borders or other designer papers.  I kept thinking it looked bare and throwing more stuff on the layout.   Fortunately, I'd saved this DSP from several years back.  It is so hard to find good purples.

To match the cardstock to the photos, I used my new Cardstock Decks just updated with all the new colors from SU!  Also, I did a deck by color - all the reds together, for example.  Visit this Tuesday for the details and links to files to make your own. 

Happy day...

Ingredients:  Stamps:  Flourishes Vol2 from Autumn Leaves
Ink:  Basic Black by SU!
Paint:  Folk Art and Anitas - mixed a couple of colors since I never have the right one on hand.
Cardstock:  Summer Sunrise from PTI; Pale Plum by SU!; Black from Hobby Lobby