Butterfly Paint Chip Card

I have recently started making cards for Operation Write Home.  I really like this organization and think what they do to support our military members and their families is just wonderful.  What they do is send quality, handmade blank cards overseas so our troops can send beautiful cards and letters home to their families.

When my hubby was deployed, we mostly relied on email and phone calls for our communication.  We didn't write any letters back and forth.  I sent a few cards to him and, of course, care packages but no letters.  The immediacy of email was faster and easier.

I recently found some letters (both of them) from earlier in my hubby's career.  It was so nice to read them again.  Hubby's grandfather was in WWII and wrote constantly.  He also drew wonderful pictures on the letters and envelopes.  This was known as trench art and is completely priceless for our family.  Before he passed away many years ago, Hubby's grandfather put these letters in an album for his daughters and grandchildren to be able to see.

Anyway, back to the cards I made.  If you have been on Pinterest at all, you have seen the tons of pins making things using paint chips from the hardware store.  The draw of these is that they are free and make the whole ombre trend easy to recreate.  So I went to the hardware store and picked up some paint samples.

I found a punch I wanted to use for my card, in this case the Stampin' Up! butterfly punch.  This is an old type before they went to the wonderful space saving style they have now.  Still one of my favorite punches though.  I was able to punch two butterflies per color.  I designed the card for three butterflies each.  This gave me two cards for each three-color paint sample.

I broke from my norm and used kraft card stock for the card base and then used a Cuttlebug embossing folder for the pretty butterfly background on white card stock .  I wanted to emboss the butterflies themselves but found that the color came off the samples when I tried to emboss them.  It wasn't a cute look either. So I left the butterflies plain and adhered them to the card with my ATG gun.  When you are placing items onto an embossed background like this, you have to use a good, strong adhesive.  I left the inside blank and decided on no sentiment for the front so the card could be used for any occasion.

I like how this card turned out.  I have made more cards that I will share soon.  If you are interested in supporting our troops and like making nice handmade cards, I recommend Operation Write Home.

Happy Scrapping!

Diane