Stampin! with Jaydee

Hi Everyone  Happy Friday.

It's the fabulous Barb's turn to host our Addicted to CAS challenge this week and she has a great word for us:

I hope you will join our challenge this week.  If you do, and you are chosen as the winner, there is a great prize on offer - a $15 shopping spree at the online store of the founder of our challenge site - Kylie:  Happy Little Stampers

If you are looking for some inspiration - you have to look no further than our fabulous design team.  Including our guest designer this week - Cat Craig .  I hope you will check our her blog - and the blogs of the rest of our design team.

On a personal note:

It's Lou's birthday this weekend and - as I said in my post last night - as part of my way of celebrating this momentous occasion, I decided to purchase some live, adult butterflies to release into our garden.  It was imperative that the butterflies were native to the area to increase their ability to survive.  Yesterday morning, 24 butterfiles - 12 Monarchs, 4 black Swallowtail, 4 Painted Ladies and 4 red admirals were delivered to our doorstep  - overnight delivery.  I was hoping for some Buckeye - as we had never seen them.. but they were not among the mixture. 

The butterflies arrived on ice - hence being delivered overnight.  Once they arrived, we had to leave them to warm up before they could fly.  We let them out of their net and placed them on the prairie plants.   About 90 minutes later they were all raring to go and were off and feeding on the plants.  I managed to capture a couple of photographs:

A couple of the painted ladies resting and warming:

Here's the interloper..... No... not a Monarch... but a Viceroy.  It's pretty hard to tell them apart - and size isn't the only indicator.  The biggest differentiator - and the easiest to spot - is the horizontal line over the bottom two wings.  But they are a pretty good doppelganger for the Monarch.

Here's the real thing:
There really is something so amazing about seeing the real thing - as Linda can tell you - especially as it is so rare to see them these days.

So... even though we released 24 butterflies - within about 2 hours only a couple of them were left.... the rest ... well they had flittered off to greener pastures.  It really was out of our hands as to what happened to them next - but there was something very special about being able to introduce them to the area and hope that they would procreate and add a few more wonderful little works of art to brighten our day.

I'll be back with my Paper Players card tomorrow night.  In the meantime, warm hugs and prayers for those of you who need a lift tonight, especially for my dearest Pammie.

Hugs

Jaydee

Card recipe:  

• Card stock: Recollections 110# White
• DSP:  Papertrey Ink
• Stamps:  Mistletoe - Papertrey Ink
• Embellishments:  Pico Irresistibles - White