Graduation Card for a Butterfly

 

I need a graduation card for a young woman I have known since she was seven who just graduated from the nursing school at Case Western Reserve University and will be pursuing some post graduate training in Pediatric Nursing.  Caring and passionate with strong people skills and experience with children and adults with special needs, she is going to be one of those peds nurses that children and their parents remember.  Because I didn't want a traditional "congratulations graduate" card, I struggled until I saw this image from the If You Give a Crafter a Cookie challenge:

I thought about how she developed from this young girl on a swim team into a fabulous woman like a caterpillar grows into a butterfly.  Butterflies and pastel colors it was going to be!  Now which of my too many butterfly stamps and dies should I use?  The current Always Fun challenge is layers, and I had a Stampin' Up layering butterfly die set that I bought last year from Stampin' Up and, unbelievably, had not used.  I had so much fun with it that you will be seeing it more in the future.

I started by blending Salvaged Patina, Tumbled Glass, and Spun Sugar Distress Oxide ink onto a panel.  Then I cut two of the bottom layer die from Neenah Classic Crest Solar White 110 lb. cardstock to stack and one of the top layer from the center of a piece of Dreamy holographic paper from Close to My Heart that I cut to 4 3/8 by 5 5/8.  I used one of the sentiments from the Simple Strips Friendship set.  This line from Taylored Expressions consists of themed rubber stamps with 18 sentiments per stamp and coordinating dies with different ends which are all interchangeable and easy to line up thanks to squares in the corners and side that you line up.  In other words, you can stamp and cut once and have 18 sentiment strips.  I have the flagged end die and several stamps and every so often stamp, emboss, and cut a mess of sentiment strips to have on hand to speed up cardmaking.  I snipped the tails off the strip and backed it with two 1/4 inch wide strips cut from the Neenah 110 lb. cardstock to pop the sentiment up over the butterflies and, because the butterflies are popped up, cut two more one inch long strips to layer under the part of the sentiment that extends over the background.

I backed the panel with the piece of Dreamy paper from which I had cut the top butterfly layer and a  piece of  Neenah cut to 5 x 6 1/4 that I embossed using the Subtle folder from Sizzex for Stampin' Up.  I toyed with embellishing the card with a few clear sparkles but I wanted to enter this card in Mod Squad Simple Focus challenge.  I also plan to enter this card in the Happy Little Stampers June Anything Goes With Dies challenge.

Thank you for stopping by!  Until next time, Hansi