Tye Dye Butterflies

 I was at my son's baseball game last week and a beautiful yellow swallowtail butterfly almost landed on me.  It was the first one that I seen in years.  I have lived in the same town my whole life.  When I was young, I collected moths and butterflies.  They were abundant!  When my husband and I purchased our home almost 13 years ago, I was thrilled when we found a purple butterfly bush right next to our patio!  I thought it would be great to sit and watch all of the different butterflies come and feed on the bush.  It would also be great to teach my young son ( and eventually his sister about all of the different species that came there).  Unfortunately, the bush attracted lots of stinging insects and we had to cut it down because of the kids.  We noticed over the years that there didn't seem too be many butterflies in our area anywhere.  Not at the pool we belong to ( the same one that I have belonged to my whole life and collected many butterflies there as a child), not at the parks, not in our yard, not in the school playground.  Not anywhere!  Thankfully, we have noticed more butterflies and moths this summer. And not just the common little white ones......swallowtails, monarchs and others.  It is so nice to see!  And the lightning bugs!  Wow!  They seem to be in the millions this summer! My kids have rediscovered the joy of seeing them at night and they loved helping their two year old cousins collect them on July 4th weekend! Here are two cards that have butterflies as the main attraction!

I CASED this card off of SCS, I don't remember from who though. Sorry.  This is the Sizzlits die that cuts and embosses the butterflies at the same time!  If you look closely, each butterfly has embossing on it!  I just really like how simple the card is too!

These are the Tye Dye Butterflies!  My daughter named them that because she said they looked like they were Tye Dyed!  So simple huh?   Baby wipes and reinkers!  Take one baby wipe, fold it in half and then fold in half again so that you end up with a square.  Then choose 3 reinkers that you like.  I chose Baja Breeze, Melon Mambo and Tangerine Tango!  Start with the darkest color (Baja Breeze for me) and spread out a few drops.  Fill in some of the white spots between those colors with the next darkest color (Melon Mambo for me).  Then, finish with the last color, using it to fill in any white spots left.  You only need to spread your inks out in a space a little larger than the size of your stamp.  The baby wipe just became your custom made tye dye ink pad!  The best part is that you can get pretty many images out of it before the color dulls.  And, if you move the stamp around within the ink, you'll get a color variation each time too.  We dressed our butterflies up with self adhesive rhinestones to finish it off!  I know that this is a pretty simple card, but I wanted the butterfly to be the star!  I think we accomplished that!  Enjoy the butterflies inside and outside this summer!