I’m just squeezing in under the wire on this challenge – it closes at 1pm today. My friend Jen calls me a rebel; I’m not so sure but here I am again refusing to go in the obvious direction! Here’s the colour palette.

I thought about doing a fall themed card but then I remembered that I’ve just received the Stampin’ Up! Swallowtail stamp and I haven’t used it yet. I also have crushed curry embossing powder and I haven’t used that either. So the direction was set. I started by embossing the image in crushed curry on pumpkin pie card stock but it didn’t grab me so here’s where I went in the end:

This is embossed in black on crushed curry. I then took my old olive blendabilities and used the medium one to colour the body and the wings next to the body changing to the light blendability as I got further away from the body. After that I used the dark pumpkin pie blendability to colour the edge of the wings and the medium to colour next to it. This left an uncoloured crushed curry portion in the middle of the wings.

I had angled the butterfly because I was intending on adding a sentiment but after the colouring I decided that I really liked the clear space around it. I think the butterfly needs the space to breathe.

Since I coloured with blendabilities right onto the card, the colours bled through to the other side. In order to hide that (mostly) I glued a very vanilla piece of card onto the other side with another image of the swallowtail – this time in crushed curry having stamped off once. I tried it in old olive but it seemed a bit of a shock on opening the card. I liked the old olive on very vanilla though and saved that for future use. Here’s the inside of the card now: