Bottle of Butterflies

Hello and welcome (back) to Words and Pictures.  Thanks for taking the time to stop by.

I'm sharing an Altered Bottle today - and altered from clear glass to green too -  so without further ado... here it is on the right, my Bottle of Butterflies!

This project was kick-started by the photo prompt over at the Shabby Tea Room challenge this week:

I loved the delicate pinks and strong greens, and also I started to crave pink lemonade really badly!!

The colours reminded me straight away of the Pink Paislee London Market collection.  I've got it with me as I've been planning to alter one of the Ikea Moppe chests of drawers with it to go in the spare room here, which is all pink and rosy.  Haven't got round to it yet... three days to go - what odds would you like to give me?!

The B of B didn't really get started though until I was washing out one of the glass bottles from the light evaporated milk we like to put in coffee.  It doesn't come in bottles in the UK, so none of this would have worked out there!

The bottle is quite small (holds less than a pint, I'd say), and has lovely fluted ridges towards the top.  Unfortunately it's clear glass, so my first desire was to see if I could transform it to green.

I haven't any alcohol inks yet (well... that's to say, I do own some, having just completed an ebay purchase, but they're on the way to my UK address, and will almost certainly be there before I am... no good to me here, though), so I had to figure out a way of getting the colour to stay on the glass surface.

I have some Peeled Paint in a Re-Inker, so the very concentrated form of Distress Ink, and I tried dabbing it onto the bottle with some paper towel.  It looked sensational... but it wouldn't stay there.  Every touch wiped some away, and left me very green-fingered (and I don't mean in a good gardener type way).

Having seen how it looked, I wasn't prepared to give up though... so I resorted to my old favourite when I can't get colour to stay where I want it - emboss it on!!

I got plenty of Peeled Paint back on to the glass (no problem with it staying wet to hold the powder), and then tipped clear embossing powder over it - making sure I had the paper there to catch it underneath (been there, done that, spent hours trying to sweep it carefully off the craft mat!).

I then started to heat it, VERY carefully, as I wasn't at all sure that I wouldn't end up shattering the glass (though it's pretty thick).

I started with one hand held in front of my eyes, just in case... and in the end resorted to putting on my sunglasses, as the closest thing to protective goggles that I had (note to self: maybe buy some protective goggles?).  In any case, disaster didn't strike, and I was thrilled to end up with a glossy green glass bottle, in the bright tones of Peeled Paint.


Once I'd decided which papers from the collection I wanted to use, they pretty much worked themselves out in terms of which order the stripes wanted to go in.  The paper's nice and sturdy, which means it was quite easy to get it to encircle the bottle.  

I knew I wanted the word BUTTERFLY, obviously, and followed the nice arching of the word from underneath as I cut that strip.  That's over to the left here.





 I also wanted the butterfly itself from that same sheet, and his stripe needed to go at the top, as I wanted his top wings to float free of the strip of paper.

The gorgeous pink music manuscript, with composers' names and lovely swirly music cover embellishments, wasn't quite pink enough once it was set against the other stripes, so I put some ink from my Spun Sugar Distress Marker with some from the Tattered Rose ink pad onto my acrylic block and blended them together onto the paper to give it an extra embarrassed blush.

The two pink butterflies are cut from that same music sheet, and - in a reluctant concession to 'girlydom' I added some Rock Candy Distress Stickles, and some sequins to tone in with the overall colour scheme.

The little silver charms which make up the bodies of the butterflies were one of my best, best bargain buys: they came from The Works, who were selling packs of 6 craft embellishments at 59p a pack, but then at BOGOF (I'm not being rude... that's Buy One Get One Free), and then came an extra reduction to four packs for £1 - that's 24 silver charms for £1.  

Sadly, this was at the beginning of the year, and I idly picked up a few packs thinking they might come in useful for something dollshouse-y for my mother.  If I had only known what obsession was about to hit me for six, I'd have bought up the entire stock!!

The flower is made with a couple of the cardstock tattered florals I bought ready-cut from ebay.  I gave them a coat of pale pink acrylic, and then stamped them with my much-loved Prima 'wallpaper' stamp, the Alla Prima background - little flowers and leaves.  

It's stamped in Ranger Archival Sap Green (appropriate given the plant stems in the photo prompt!), but it's very delicate, and hard to see in the bright sunlight which has suddenly flooded the Czech Republic again today.  The whole thing's also got a generous spritz of Perfect Pearls Mist in Pearl.

The bow is made from the white gauze ribbon which I get for free every time I buy a box of the plain cream cards and envelopes I like, again from The Works.  They're a great base for cardmaking, and they come tied up all prettily in yards of this white ribbon.

I did my trick of pulling it through, pressing it under my thumb, against the Tattered Rose ink pad, to get that nice blush onto it (and onto my thumb).  

I've also used some of the Tim Holtz tissue tape - the butterflies from the Sketchbook set - right at the top of the bottle, pressing them into the ridges of the screwtop, and then giving them a swipe or two with the blending tool pad I use for green - which by now has a combination of Forest Moss, Bundled Sage, Sap Green and a bit of Peeled Paint all embedded into it.  I didn't even add any extra, just used up some of the spare ink soaked into the sponge!

You can get a better idea of the colour here.  I also wanted a sort of double bow affair... so, having placed a button (pink acrylic to the rescue again) as the centre of the flower, I added a couple of extra lengths of the ribbon, so that there'd be an additional 'layer' to the bow.

I'm so glad the sun came out for the photos of this one... it really allows that green glass to glow.






Thank you for spending some time here at Words and Pictures today - especially if you've given up some sunshine to be here!  I didn't realise that once the sun came out there'd be such a conflict between my desire to soak some of it up, and my desire to continue crafting.  Anyone who knows me, and my sun-worshipper tendencies, will understand what a statement that makes about the power of this addiction I've developed!






I'm entering this in the following:
The Shabby Tea Room challenge: Oh - So Pretty In Pink
Simon Says Anything Goes at the Simon Says Stamp challenge blog
Buttons and Bows over at The Craftroom Challenge
At the Anything Goes challenge there's a suggestion - Let's Not Be Square
A Muse Studio who are inviting us to have Triple the Fun, with at least one flower, one ribbon and one button on the project.

I'm making another entry to Top Tip Tuesday (for whom I'll be making a Guest Designer appearance shortly, thanks to my Big Top... watch this space) and their Circles challenge.  They also invite you to add a tip.  My first thought was: When using sequins... don't!  But I suspect that's not quite what they're after.  

So I think I'm going to go with my glass altering technique, with a strong Health and Safety caution: Make sure you have heat-happy glass - eg. would it withstand boiling water being poured into it?.  Apply Distress Re-Inker (for the concentrated colour) to the glass.  Add clear embossing powder and heat VERY CAREFULLY - protective clothing may be advisable.  No joke. 

Butterflies are self-propelled flowers.
R.H. Heinlein

The butterfly counts not months but moments, and has time enough.
Rabindranath Tagore

And to all my followers, old and new, an Irish blessing:
May the wings of the butterfly kiss the sun
And find your shoulder to light on,
To bring you luck, happiness and riches,
Today, tomorrow and beyond.

L'Homme avec un Parapluie

Oh, okay then, it's Umbrella Man... but he is en français!  That is to say, he's in Prima's En Francais paper collection:

I'm entering this for The Play Date Cafe's weekly colour challenge - they're looking for designs including combinations of Cotton Candy, Ruby, Citrus and Dusk.  I hope this fits the bill.  And I hope it will also work well for Fussy and Fancy's Friday challenge - Fancy Folds (how's that for alliteration?!).

This is also my entry for A Trip Down Memory Lane's sixth (yup, count'em) challenge, Scraplift It, from their Cybercrop weekend last week.  I'm afraid I haven't managed all the challenges.  Many of them were based around scrapbook pages, and that's not something I've really delved into yet.  But you can see my entry for Challenge 1 here if you're interested.

Challenge 6 is all about taking inspiration from somebody else's project - known as "lifting", and we were invited to scraplift from the Gallery of ATDML's Design Team.  I chose one of Ann Freeman's projects from the June Gallery, a lovely gatefold card.  I really wanted to try out that structure for a card.  I love the idea of something hidden then being revealed.

So yet another member of Team Umbrella Man was deployed, this time to France.  I got the Prima En Francais 6x6 pad a while back, and although I've used the odd paper here and there, I'd never focussed a project around it.  What a gorgeous collection it is!

But I didn't want to be covering it up too much, so I selected a slightly plainer page from Paper Cellar's Victorian Classic to tone in with the Prima ones, and that I've added some stamping and embossing to, selecting images which match those in the En Francais sheets.


Here's Kaisercraft's Eiffel Tower embossed with clear powder over Sepia Archival Ink with a touch of Aged Mahogany on the stamp too (I know, I know, I shouldn't really mix them, but Aged Mahogany by itself was just too rich a red.




The crown here is from one of my favourite sets, Pink Paislee's London Market (new abbreviation suggestion: PPLM - can you bear it?  I just seem to have to type it an awful lot), and the little envelope is cut from one of the other En Francais sheets, backed on card and edged with some Weathered Wood Distress Ink (that would be by Tim Holtz, in case anyone's forgotten!).


I also cut the key trim from the other sheet to edge this fold of the card with... I've done the same on many of the edges.  The patterns on these little strips are just adorable.  The attention to detail, as with all Prima papers, is phenomenal.


I put a touch of Glossy Accents on the red ribbon on the envelope, as I wanted to pick out that detail...


... to go with the actual little red bow I made and attached on the opposite fold.  The only ribbon I had that was narrow enough was a bright scarlet (off some Christmas presents aeons ago, stored and hoarded ever since for the day when I would find a use for it), and looked horrid against the browny-reds of the card.


I used Vintage Photo Distress Stain (TH!) to just tone it down a little, and was very pleased with the result.  I did, however, get very sticky fingers trying to glue it into the bow shape.










So that's what's on the front...  Here it is lying flat, so that you can see how Umbrella Man overlaps onto the other side.  That was one of the adaptations I made to the sketch I was lifting: I'm not much of a one for symmetricality; I like things slightly off-centre, or skewiff.


Now we get to open up the flaps... one at a time now...

First glimpse you get of the inside gives you the TH Eiffel Tower embossed on the inner flap to echo the outer, smaller Eiffel Tower (same colours, same process), as well as a glimpse of another use of the newly-dyed ribbon.


Bunting seems to be everywhere at the moment, I guess because of the Jubilee, but this is a French card, so I've Frenchified the bunting.  Why that should mean it hangs vertically instead, I don't know... but that was the shape I felt I needed to balance the columns created by the flaps of the card.



Again, the little cards are cut from one of the Prima sheets, mounted on card, and inked with Weathered Wood to give a little definition to the edges.


I punched holes using the second smallest punch on my revolving hole punch, and threaded them on to another length of 'vintage scarlet' ribbon.  


Cheat sheet: they're attached in the simplest possible way - with sticky tape on the back side of the card!  I originally had them dangling completely freely, but that caused trouble when closing the card, so now the bottom one has a dab of glue holding it in place.


And here's the fully opened card:

Again, I just want to draw your attention to some of the delights of the detail in the papers:


... these gorgeous tickets of entry to all sorts of lovely places tucked in the corner of the central paper... 




... and then the trim alongside the Eiffel Tower stamp, and the fleur-de-lys one on the opposite edge.  


I love how you can just see Umbrella Man standing with his back to you round the edge of this flap!


So, I hope you like it.  I had a lovely time creating it: playing with these delicious papers can't help but inspire you.  


Thank you so much for spending some time here at Words and Pictures.  If you'd like to see more, why not join as a Follower, and you'll be sure not to miss anything.


A walk about Paris will provide lessons in history, beauty, and in the point of Life.
Thomas Jefferson