Butterflies meet NBUS

I'd already planned this card in my head before Darnell announced the optional theme for this week's NBUS (Never Before Used Schtuff) challenge. The beautiful Katzelkraft frame stamp was part of a batch of lovely stamps that one of my daughters gave me for Mothers Day last March, but unlike all the others she gave me, it was still sealed up in its original cello bag.

My plan was to stamp and colour it, cut out the centre and place it over a stamped text background and then add the butterflies, sticking to shades of brown so that it could also be an entry for the Butterfly Challenge, which is currently Underneath or Umber (oh, and Mrs A of said challenge has candy on her personal blog, check my sidebar for details!)

Then Darnell made me rethink, when she announced this week's optional theme  which is to use bubble wrap. So I thought "Why not?" and put the script stamp away for some other time.

I used a Walnut Stain Distress Stain to ink the bubble wrap then used it like a stamp on the card. The frame is stamped in brown Memento and coloured with watercolour pencils and a water brush, as are the butterflies (an old Kanban stamp)  and given dimension with Pinflair glue.

The jury's still out on whether the bubble wrap looks better than the script would have done - I think with the script, it would have had more of a "shabby chic" look and lent itself to a fussier treatment, with my whole battery of distressing techniques, lace, doileys, ribbons and pearls thrown at it! But the spots from the bubble wrap echo the circles in the frame, so it's a completely different look.