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This butterfly card is one I made for the very first order I received. I was given a lot of freedom, and this is one of the things I came up with.

I would like to enter it into Emma's Crafty Challenge, for which the theme this month is monochrome.

 
Well, it had been my intention to create a step-by-step log on how I made these Spring Fest cards. It definitely was a slow and steady process, as I am limited in what I can do, so I had to spread the work over the course of about a month. Unfortunately, that left me unable to blog about it. Apart from the cards themselves there was so much else to organise for the party, which obviously took priority. So I'm afraid I can't even show any photographs of the work in progress, or anything. I might catch up with some later.

In any case, I suppose it was all pretty straight forward really. I continued to work task by task. Next step was sticking the cut pieces on to each other. The challenge was learning how to get them centred, and accepting that good enough really is good enough. I asked the advice of some more experienced crafters and ended up working out a system that worked for me. I would take hold of the card with tweezers at the top, and hold my fingernail at the bottom to steady it. It took a bit of practice, I got better and better at it as I went along.

The other thing I learnt is that you do eventually run out of things. Next time I should check my stock of tape and such in advance. 

I first prepared the orange on green, and green on orange matting. Then the base card needed folding, and the spine needed breaking so that they would stand up as an easle. I ended up engaging my husband in this, as I lacked the strength.

Meanwhile I could get on with cutting the photographs to size. Hubby had taken some gorgeous shots of our little boy, all dressed up in his suit and tie, out in the garden, and printed them off on photo paper. I soon learned I had to cut them by hand, as I would always miss the edge when I tried to use the cutter. Then back to the tape, tweezers and fingernails...

Then the squares were ready to be stuck on the base card. Careful with the top ones: they only needed tape on the bottom half, so the top would come up with the easle! Also careful to put the picture in the right direction. As it is a twisted easel the picture changes direction when it is put up.

Well, actually that is the order it should have been done in. As I was waiting for new tape pens to arrive, I started on the embellishments before sticking the pictures on to the easel. I took a bit of a risk, not knowing whether I would be able to stick them on relatively straight, when the surface was raised by the sachets of chocolates underneath.

I worked out a way to get the sachets attached to the cards in such a way that when they come off for people to eat the choccies, they are still left with a nice decent card that looks complete. I used ribbon, layering it on high tack tape so that I had loops. I did three loops, then a flat bit, then three loops again. I made some flowers with punches and stuck those on the flat bit. Then I strung the ribbon to tie the sachets with through the two loops to the side of the flat bit. I filled the tuile with 25 chocolates beans eachs, scooped it together, and tied it with the orange ribbon. Then curled the ribbon with scissors and Bob's your uncle.

I did manage to stick the ribbon on in the wrong direction on five cards first, despite being very careful and thinking it all through. Ah, well, lucky I saw it before I did them all! 

I still felt there was more I could have done to them, but I lacked the time. I guess it is always the same for any card.