Bleached backgrounds with handmade paper for these sympathy cards

These pieces of paper have been sitting since Christmas and arrived wrapped around gifts from my daughter!! She knew they would not go to waste!!  I finally unearthed them and decided to make a few cards with them. I started by modifying the dark blue gift wrap using a handmade stamp and some bleach!!  The handmade stamp is just rubber trimmings glued to a piece of wood!!  I spread some bleach on a plate and used it as a stamp pad and stamped all over the blue paper after crinkling and ironing it flat several times.  You can see the whole sheet below.

The other piece of paper was commercial handmade paper with natural additions which is beautiful and has texture on the one side.
For the first card I combined the two.  I glued the beautiful deckle edge of the brown one to a scrap of the blue one and trimmed the piece down to 4" x 5.25" which I then glued to a dark blue card front.  I watercoloured the butterfly (CLKER), layered it onto a brown rectangle with distressed edges.  I slipped a little laser printed greeting in between the two and adhered this large element to the front of my card over the join in my background.  It still needed a bit of something so I added some dots on the left hand side of the brown layer and that worked.  Love the look!
For my second card, I stitched a torn strip of the blue paper to a full background of the brown paper and stamped the greeting below in blue then glued it to a dark blue card front.  I embossed the wings of the little butterfly punchie (SU), tied on a brown fiber to create its body and then glued it to the front of my card using a small piece of a glue dot to allow the wings to be free.
I am looking forward to making a few more cards with these papers!!

Therese