That’s the question that my mother posed. She needed some mini cards (3 by 3) with both butterflies and a rainbow of colour.

Three by three is a fun size and you can get 8 cards from a 12 by 12 piece of paper so it’s also very economical. I used my stampin’ scorer to score lines around each side of the card (hard to see in the photograph) but on the inside of the card so that the line sticks out from the card – whatever the reverse of indented is. I then took a baby wipe and 7 re-inkers. The way that I’ve seen the baby wipe technique before is to randomly dot colours over your baby wipe but I wanted a more or less recognisable rainbow so I did 3 drops of each colour together and then put the next colour next to that so that I had 7 rows of colour. I used elegant eggplant, night of navy, marina mist, pear pizzazz, daffodil delight, tangerine tango and real red.

The stamp I’m using is a remnant after I de-wheeled the now retired butterfly wheel. When you pull the rubber stamp off a wheel, it’s too long for any of the clear blocks so I cut off a column of three butterflies which created a little stamp perfect for this card.

Pressing the stamp into the baby wipe caused a fair bit of ink to pass through to the paper beneath. I found it was useful to use a plastic sheet from a photopolymer stamp set to stop getting ink on everything – and of course it is easily cleaned with stampin’ mist. I then used my stamp-a-ma-jig to position my butterflies correctly as well to prevent the dreaded wobble. It seemed to be more critical to not wobble when using this technique because the stamp got more ink on the edges than it would under normal inking. I was making a set of twelve so I was careful to clean the colours off the stamp before stamping the next card so that I wouldn’t get my colours mixed. This technique meant that each card was not identical which was rather fun and I’m happy to report that my mother loves them.

This was a rather messy operation and my hands ended up pretty stained with ink. I’ve found that the easiest way to get them completely clean is to wash my hair! Vigorously. 🙂