Mint and margins.

A bit of a departure here for me. I decided to attempt a shabby chic style card. I looked up some pictures on the old internet and the rule seems to be More is Not Quite Enough. 
I started with some papers. I chose them for the greens and decided that pink would be my other colour.
I used a small embossing folder for the margins. I bought this as part of a prize I won at the Butterfly Challenge, it is very pretty. Then I roughed up all the edges with scissors and rolling.  

 
The flowers are made withe one of my older stamps, a lovely Inkadinkado rose, cut out and coloured with Pro-markers. The leaves are die cuts, cut from green card and inked a little round the edges. The darker green stems are also die cuts and I added a little raffia.
I fiddled about with it for what seems like days before settling and sticking it all down.I helped that my husband was away for part of the weekend so I didn't have to pretend to be doing something else. Not that he minds, the guilt is all mine.

Having stuck down the papers I thought I'd just check that I had the card opening the correct way and discovered I was sticking it all onto a flat piece of card! The square of kraft had been lying on my desk so I grabbed it to see how it would look laid out.  Managed to peel it all off and re-do on a proper card, it all adds to the distressing... What a ditz though.

The butterfly is from a nameless set. Stamped on white and coloured. It is a bit raised which doesn't show much here.  I also stamped it on the background paper to get the antennae to show.

 Finally I added some black Stickles for a bit of sparkle to the butterfly and flowers. 
I really haven't gone the whole hog with shabby chic. It needs more layers, floppy bows and ribbon, gems and pearls but I don't like to cover up the lovely paper.  

I had real trouble getting the colours right in the photo, they always look washed out. The more I look the worse the photos look, you can't see any of the detail of colouring etc. But I've taken so many I'm giving up and getting on with my life now. 

I am linking this to the Butterfly Challenge where it is M for Margins and or Mint. I feel sure that one of these greens is mint! The leaves are definitely minty and the borders, though it's rather difficult to tell here.
And I'm nipping into Pixie's Snippets playground between rain showers. I have used snippets for all the additions but the backing papers were cut from new sheets! Shocking. I am using my stash though.

Now I'm off to find out how to take good photos.