Tea, Thanks

Happy hump day, peeps.  Hope you're having a good week.  If not, maybe a butterfly tea party will cheer you up?

So the Stampin' Up! retirement list dropped yesterday, and while Swallowtail is safe for another year, Tea Party is going bubye, so I thought I'd use it on a card today (the tag and the swag at the bottom are both from Tea Party).  This year I have 24 stamp sets that are on the retiring list, and I'm sad about a few of them (By the Seashore!  Stippled Blossoms!  Four You!) but mostly I'm a little scared they're retiring all my favorite Framelits.  So I hope they've got some good shapes up their sleeves for the new catalog!

Anyway, back to today's card.  I used the color combination from Cupcake Inspirations:

I don't think I edited the color on my photo quite right, my card looks better IRL because the Pistachio Pudding card base doesn't look quite so washed out.  I think you get the idea, though.  I also used the sketch from Fab Friday:

Obviously I changed the shapes on a few of the elements, but I think it's still pretty clear that I followed the sketch.  I even used a button and twine :)  The button is an older retired style, but hey, half this card is going to be retired as of June 2.

And finally, I'm going to enter this in the current challenge at The Paper Players:

To make my background for the butterfly, I heavily spritzed some watercolor paper with water, then dropped ink refills on it and swirled it around...I found out the hard way you have to swirl the ink immediately, because if you don't it settles into the paper a bit and it looks like the watercolor paper has some weird multicolored measles or something.  Not the look I was going for.  So after the second try (got it right that time), I set it aside to dry while I worked on a scrapbook layout, and then stamped the butterfly and put the card together a little bit later.

That's it for me today, peeps.  Hope you have a great day!

Supplies, all SU!
Stamps:  Swallowtail, Tea Party
Ink:  Wisteria Wonder, Elegant Eggplant, Wisteria Wonder & Pistachio Pudding ink refills
Paper:  Pistachio Pudding, Whisper White, watercolor paper
Accessories:  Retired tag punch, retired button, white baker's twine