Fabric Butterflies

As I mentioned a couple of days ago, I recently attended the annual Stampin' Up! convention (held right here in Melbourne this year - very handy!). As always, we were treated to entertaining and informative presentations on different aspects of the business of Stampin' Up! as well as nifty crafting ideas to share with our customers.

One of the things that was highlighted was the use of the Big Shot as more than a papercrafting tool. Now I already knew this, in fact I made a little sample book of all the things I had laying about that I put through the Big Shot, just to see what it would cut.

But somehow over the past year I had forgotten. Seeing what people had created using the some of the SU exclusive Sizzix dies made me want to try my hand at something a little different from my usual cards.

And here they are:

Using the Beautiful Butterflies Bigz die, you can cut four different butterfly shapes. Here I have used the three smallest, cut out of felt scraps leftover from my daughter's Textiles project over the holidays (and was I kicking myself when I realised she could have used the Big Shot to help her out?!).

I dug out my old embroidery thread and did some simple backstitch and blanket stitching to edge the layers of wings, and then raided my beading supplies for the bodies. This is where the Rhinestone Brads (on special this week until May 24) would have been perfect, if I had any - I'll be adding them to my next order for sure!

Overall it only took a couple of hours to put these together, and that's including the time spent trying to a) find my beads and b) decide which ones to use. I still have to sift through all that jewellery stuff to find pin backs to turn these into brooches. Or perhaps I could sew them onto a ponytail holder or a headband?

For reference, the largest butterfly shown here is 7.6cm across.

And here's closeups of each ...

Supplies used:
Beautiful Butterflies Bigz die