Blossom Tree with Butterfly plus mini tutorial

I have had a very busy day.  I started off making three batches of marionberry jam.  Have you ever heard of marionberries.  I never did until I lived down in Vancouver, Washington where there are many, many types of delicious berries.  My granddaughter returned last night from Vancouver with a flat of these berries for us, so with lots of help from my DH, we made 15 jars of jam this morning.  

This afternoon I had fun creating this card using this beautiful LaBlanche "Blossom Tree with Butterfly (LB1021).  The image was stamped on a piece of LaBlanche Specialty Stamping Paper.  It was stamped using Ranger's black "Archival" ink.  Not only does this ink leave a very clearly stamped image, but it is really "black" -- not a faded out black.  This is the ink LaBlanche recommends to use with these very finely detailed images. To color the image I used Distress Inks and "Cut-n-Dry Pen Nibs".  These items are shown below.

 These are the inks used to color the image.

 I have talked about using these Nibs before but wanted to post a picture so you can see the package.  You get 10 of them in a package.  Can you see the very fine point on the two outside the package.  The way I colored was to ink the tip of the Nib by just rolling it on the pad.  The point is so small it is very easy to color very narrow spaces such as the branches.  If you want to color a larger area, you ink the side of the Nib so you can color a wider area.  This Specialty paper is suburb for blending colors.  After the image was colored, I tore the edge of the paper so I could sponge more distress ink (Scattered Straw).  Notice how the color is darker on the torn edges.  This was such a fun way to finish this image.

 The background for this card is a punched border using the Martha Stewart Doulbe Arches punches.  This is a 5.5" square card, so I started with a 6" square to punch.  It was sponged with Distress Ink.  The card base is ivory but looks white in the photo. 

I thought I would give you a mini tutorial on how I made the bow for this card.  I used some seam binding you can get from Joan's Gardens.   To color it I placed it on my Teflon Craft pad and used the Distress Stain to run down the length of it.  Once it had color on most of it, I spritzed it with water and rolled it around until it was completely dyed.  In the picture I had not run the stain all the way down yet.  

 

After I had it completely colored, I placed it in a couple of sheets of paper towel and scrunched it up to "crinkle" it and also to get the excess moisture out. 

 

I used the heat gun then to get it completely dry.  Be sure to place it on the craft sheet when you use the heat gun.  You want to keep it all "scrunched" up while drying it. 

 

To create the bow, I first cut off a small piece to tie around the bow then wrapped the remainder around my hand using it all.  Tie the short piece around the middle.  I wanted to fray the ends of the seam binding so I used the scissors to fray the ends.  I placed a Webster's Pages button in the middle.

All the products I have used on this card can be purchased from Joan's Gardens.

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