Archive for the ‘Flight of the Butterfly’ Category

Thank you for all your sweet comments about our Catty Cruise and my Bountiful Butterfly projects. Aren’t our cruise Stewards amazing?! Be sure to visit our home port, Catty Cruise Line, for news about upcoming cruises and profiles of our fabulously talented Cruise Stewards. We’ll be setting sail again to cruise through the new Stampin’ Up! Mini Catalog on September 25.

The Bountiful Butterfly projects I shared during the cruise are in response to a call for butterflies. In an effort to remember the more than 1.5 million innocent children murdered during the Holocaust, the Holocaust Museum of Houston is collecting 1.5 million handmade butterflies. The butterflies
will eventually comprise a breath-taking exhibition, currently scheduled for Spring 2012. The museum has already collected an estimated 400,000 butterflies. I guess these projects will make it 400,012 butterflies.

If you’d like to contribute, you can mail your handmade butterflies to

Craft Critique
Attn: Butterfly Project
649 N. Spring Street
Elgin, IL 60120

by September 19, 2009, or to the Holocaust Museum of Houston by July 30, 2011. (Click on the links for more information and guidelines.)

Holocaust Museum Houston
Butterfly Project
Education Department
5401 Caroline St.
Houston, TX 77004

So, here are just a few more details about my butterfly projects.I found the Shadow Box frame at Ikea for $9.99. I used a household straight pin to mount each butterfly to a 2″ Aluminum White Metal Edge Tag covered with a cork sheet I cut with our Circle Scissor Plus. You can find these cork sheets at Hobby Lobby with or without adhesive backs. You can even find them in hardware stores with the shelf lining. Cork sheets are great fun to cut with our die cuts or circle cutter, but beware, they’re too thick for punches.

I was really intimidated when I saw these Tri-Shutter cards popping up on Splitcoast Stampers. But, they’re actually incredibly easy to make. You can find instructions and a whole gallery of these cards here: TLC221 Tri-Shutter Card Instructions.

I really had fun making each butterfly unique, so there are quite a few ingredients in this recipe for the specimen box and matching card.

Stamp Sets: Flight of the Butterfly (111564) and Define Your Life (114950)
Paper: Cottage Wall (115671) and Old Olive, Pale Plum, Rich Razzleberry, Soft Suede, and Whisper White cardstock. Cork Sheets (non-Stampin’ Up!).
Tools: Butterfly Punch (116629), Trio Flower Punch (109183), Circle Scissor Plus (112530), Finial Press and Elegant Bouquet Textured Impressions Embossing Folder (115963 and 115964), Beautiful Butterflies Bigz Dies (114507), Big Shot Die-Cut Machine (113439).
Embellishments (butterfly body parts): Playground and Button Latte Designer Buttons (116313 and 114333); Circle Ice Rhinestone Brads (109111); Pewter Build-a-Brad (109128); Filigree Designer Brads (112579); wire. Aluminum White Metal Edge Tag (103374). Straight Pins.
Fibers: 1-1/4″ Old Olive Striped Grosgrain Ribbon (115618), Rich Razzleberry Polka-dot Grosgrain (115613)

If you’re able to take time out of your busy summer to make a butterfly for the Holocaust Museum of Houston, I hope you’ll let me know. I know we’ll be making a road trip to Houston in Spring 2012!

Ahoy, me Hearties! Welcome to our maiden voyage on the Catty Cruise. If you just sailed from Linda Heller’s port of call, Where the Rubber Hits the Road, isn’t she amazing?! I’ve been following (stalking) her for ages, and I love everything she does, especially the magic she performed with those wood sheets.

Grab a deck chair. We’ve gathered 12 incredible stampers for an amazing cruise through the new Stampin’ Up! catalog. You’ll get to the next port by clicking on the port hole at the end of this post. But, if we somehow lose you along the way, you can always rejoin us by visiting our home port, Catty Cruise Line.

My favorite thing about the new catalog is that it combines some of my favorite stamp sets from the previous catalog with some amazing new products. So, while I’m highlighting the new butterfly punch and the Cottage Wall Designer Series Paper, I’m also showing off one of my favorite sets not-so-new sets, Flight of the Butterfly.

Does this look familiar? Check out page 118 of the catalog. I forget sometimes what a great inspiration the catalog is. When I saw the butterfly shadowbox, it reminded me so much of collecting insects at girl scout camp (yes, I was a girl scout). If you look really closely, you can see I even stuck little pins in the butterflies, just like we did at camp. (I promise, no butterflies were injured in the making of this specimen case.)

Now, if you look real, real close, you can see a few other new products: the brown butterfly in the top left corner is textured with the new Finial Press Embossing Folder and the Playground and Button Latte Designer Buttons embellish two of the butterflies on the right. Oh, and I love the new 1-1/4″ Striped Grosgrain Ribbon.

I used our new Circle Scissor Plus to cut circles out of cork sheets and layered them on our Medal Edge Tags – clever for pinning down my butterfly specimens, huh. The butterfly in the middle is stamped with the baby wipe technique – a great technique for creating one-of-a-kind specimens. And, because each butterfly is unique, the tag at the very top left uses the “Define Your Life” stamp set and says: “or-i-gin-al: Fresh and innovative, One of a kind, unique, first in its class. Work of Heart. ‘Be original.’ ”

So, now we need a card to go with this.

But, wait, this is a quad-fold card.

And, yep, I snuck in a few more new products, like the 1/2″ Polka Dot Grosgrain Ribbon, Modern label Punch, and Elegant Bouquet Embossing Folder (sanded to make it pop out a bit). Shew . . . too many ingredients in these projects to give all the details today. But, later this week, I’ll give you all the recipe and instructions so you can make your own specimen bo x and coordinating card.

As much as I’d love to keep you at Catered Crop, it’s time to weigh anchor again and embark on to the next port, the fabulously talented Lynn Weiss at L W Designs. She’s going to show you projects with the tranquil set, Peace Within.

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Till next time when I’ll give you more details to make your own butterfly card and specimen box, smooth sailing to you all. I’ll also share with you a very special cause for celebrating and making butterfly crafts.