Butterflies and Bunting

I've just come back from a week's holiday to hideous weather up here in NW England and so all I want to do is hole myself up in my craft room and play.

With this in mind, this morning I went on the hunt for a challenge to inspire me and this week's challenge on Daring Card Makers fit the bill perfectly:

This week it's me (Kathy) here to set the new dare and I'd like you to

Come Fly With Me

My theme is All Up in the Air, really ;-) - I'd like to see the main elements of your card being things that fly, flutter, hover or waft about "up there" in the sky.

The hideous weather I've come back from holiday to has made me crave sunny days and afternoon tea parties with bunting flapping in the wind and butterflies hovering over head.  So this is what I came up with:

It's a card for a friend whose birthday is not until late October, by which time I think we will all be craving sunny days and blue skies!


Ingredients: Papers October Afternoon (Fly a Kite range - even that fits the dare!), Quickutz alphabet dies, Cuttlebug cake die, Nellie Snellen frame die, American Crafts ribbon, pen stitching, garden twine from Wilko, punched butterflies.


Just a note on the 'stitching'.  One of the comments on my last post asked if it was real stitching on my cards.  It isn't!  After thinking I had broken my sewing machine the only time I tried to stitch a card I always stick with my pen stitching method: piercing the card/paper with a map pin and then drawing in the 'thread' with a fineliner pen.  (It's much less stressful.)


As I said at the start of this post I've just come back from holiday and I can say there where we were there was no shortage of sunny days and blue skies as Mr Crafty Blogger and I spent a fantastic week on the beautiful Greek island of Santorini.  I don't want to bore you all with the hundreds of pics I took so here's a storyboard of just a few of them:

(storyboard created using a template from Coffee Shop)

We stopped at THIS fantastic hotel in the capital Fira (or Thira).  Not only were the facilities excellent we also had amazing views of the Caldera (volcano) and the sunsets which Santorini is famous for.  (I took the photo on the top right of the storyboard from our balcony!)


Although we stopped in Fira, we managed to get around the island very easily by bus, including a  number of trips to the beautiful (and very photogenic) village of Oia which is where three of the storyboard photos were taken.


I promised not to bore you with the photos, but before I sign-off I just want to share one of my favourite shots from the week:

If you are interested I have put a few more shots on my Flickr.

Thanks for looking,

Ruthie x