An Explosion Of Butterflies

I hope I find you well and enjoying your Saturday.

What a mix of weather we've had this week. After a sweltering first half, we then had thunderstorms followed by a really wet day on Thursday. Yesterday was warm and breezy and today is damp and misty.

Despite the rain we had a run to Ilkley this morning. They are having a three day continental market on the main street and there are all sorts of interesting foods to try and things to look at. We had a lovely browse and came home with several bags of delights.

I managed to finish my exploding box in time for my Aunt and Uncle's Golden Wedding celebrations last weekend so I thought I'd share it with you since it has now been safely delivered.

I find these really hard to photograph so please forgive the poor pictures but I think you can see the general idea.


I've used this same design on many occasions but saw recently the side panels embossed somewhere on blogland and liked the texture it gave. It's also much quicker than all the stamping I usually do which is great when I've left things until the last minute as usual.


The butterflies are from the recent Kanban QVC TSV which was a brilliant buy. I love all the stamps in the set and have already used most of them. These were coloured with H20's and then some diamond stickles added.


The sentiment was computer generated and cut with a Nestie and coloured with some Stampin Up dye ink.

It was also the start of a new theme over at The Stampman ATC swap and we are asking you to think of all things to do with the Ocean this month.


I embossed mine with swirls which I always think look like waves before colouring it with Starburst stains and distress ink. The ship, from the Aspects of Design Nautical set, was cut out and added with foam pads.

Thanks for stopping by and for putting up with my poor blogging at the minute. I hope you are all enjoying your Summer whatever you are up too and thank you again for your lovely comments. Enjoy the rest of the weekend.

All That Blooms

Well, it's Friday again and another week nearly done. Is it me, or do they just go faster and faster?

What's happened to the weather, or was that Summer? We've had a week of solid rain, mist and general gloom and it's soooo cold, I'm back in sweaters again. We had to laugh though, last weekend we bought a lovely little table and two chairs for the patio, somewhere to sit and have coffee on those lovely Summer mornings and our Neighbour said "that's it, you've done it now, it'll do nothing but rain" and that's exactly what's happened. I've just admired our lovely table from the window.

In the last post I shared the Wedding card I'd made for my friend who'd got married over the Bank Holiday. She's works at my daughter's school and the teachers asked me to make an exploding box for them to give her. She's a huge Bradford Bulls Rugby fan and actually got married at the ground so they wanted rugby balls to come out of it.


This is what I came up with. I kept the outside quite plain and just used a textured pearly cream card to decorate it, matted with gold mirricard and added a paper rose on the lid.


All the teachers signed the inside and I printed the rugby balls off the Internet, cut them out and glossed them. The bouquet of roses and leaves hid all the acetate and I let the leaves come up the strips of acetate so that they had a bit of movement too. The roses were made out of a cream textured paper and I just added a hint of brushed corduroy to them. The punched leaves had a swirly stamp added to look like veining.


She is absolutely thrilled with it and has it on her desk and shows anyone who comes by. She's stood it up in the lid so that the roses and balls are on the top of the box and it looks really good, I would never have thought of turning it inside out.


I'm entering it into the Tuesday Taggers challenge this week as their theme is "All That Blooms".

Thanks for stopping by and I hope you all have a great Weekend. I think the forecasters are promising at least a little bit of sunshine!!