RAINBOWS AND BUTTERFLIES

Besides leprechauns, clovers and pots o' gold, what else do you associate with St. Patrick's Day? Yes, RAINBOWS! You are all so smart!

And what goes so naturally with rainbows? Yes! BUTTERFLIES!

Well, since St. Patrick's Day is this week, I wanted to incorporate a rainbow into a card. I'm not at all Irish, so I'll just stick to the rainbow.

I tried a variety of papers for die cutting the gorgeous butterfly. None of them seemed quite right. They didn't provide the contrast I wanted. Nor did they look ethereal enough for my taste.

All of a sudden, I remembered that I had a wondrous stash of colored vellum papers. I tried a few of them, and discovered that I was getting closer to the look that I wanted. But, still not quite there. With the colorful rainbow background, I'd decided that a neutral color for the butterfly would be best. Finally, I laid hands on this dark kraft colored vellum. Once I die cut the butterfly, I found it to be the perfect material from which the butterfly on my card should be made.

I wanted to keep my butterfly as pure as possible, such as no embellishments whatsoever. So, the problem of adhering the butterfly against the rainbow background would certainly prove to be problematic.As any of you who have worked with vellum know, it is really difficult to adhere a piece to a surface without the adhesive showing through.

In pondering how to rectify this situation before it even happened, I hit upon die cutting the butterfly once more from white cardstock. This not only would hide the adhesive, but it would give the butterfly a little more durability.

But . . . I still needed to adhere the vellum butterfly to the cardstock butterfly without letting any adhesive show through. It turned out to be very easily solved. I used the Tombow Multipurpose Glue, but smeared it to a soft sheen of glue with my fingertip. That was enough to soften the edges of the glue that it wouldn't show through.

I then popped just the body of the butterfly against the rainbow with some thin slices of dimensional adhesive.

The dimension this simple treatment gives to the butterfly against the splashy rainbow is wonderful.

To add even further to the dimension of the finished card, I lined the edges of the piece of watercolor paper with Stampin' Dimensionals and threw a few into the center of the piece also so it didn't sink in the middle.

The white cardstock butterfly underneath the vellum one is offset just a teeny bit, 

and I love the way that looks.

Do any of you know how I created the rainbow background? 

Rainbow

Smiles.