butterfly chunky swap

i'm participating in a butterfly chunky swap. when i think about the swap i usually get a very vague direction of where i want to go, but how the piece ends up is always a mystery in the making. i knew i wanted to do something with a tie dye effect, mostly because i just love tie dye, but because butterflies come in so many wonderful colors. the swap has us making 5 butterflies and we will get to keep on for ourselves, so i decided to make them all different colors. when you look at the end product it appears simple to make, and i suppose there was nothing really hard about them, but they were so time consuming. i worked on them all morning and afternoon.

here's how i made them:

i used white craft ink to stamp a large medallion on white paper and then embossed it with clear embossing powder. i cut a long strip of yarn that i sewed with a zig zag stitch to secure for the body of the butterfly. i used tan ink to distress around the edges of the butterfly. i also took some dark gray ink and did the same with that. i took tim holtz distress inks and laid out 3 color patterns on a craft sheet and did his watercolor technique, using a different set of 3 colors for each butterfly . once all the butterflies dried i stamped a swirl pattern in those same inks around the top and bottom of the wings. i used black ink to stamp spots, a saying, and a little companion butterfly. i edged the butterfly with a similar color in an opaque paint pen which i outlined in black marker. i used krystal effects around the entire edge and sprinkled that with seed beads. once that dried i used my crop-a-dile to punch a hole through all the layers to fasten 2 colors of wires to use as antannae.