Dark Enchantment - DC Enchanted Challenge

I recently won the Enchanted Challenge over on the DoCrafts Challenge Forum and as a result I got to chose the next theme. I went for 'Dark Enchantment', I like witchy, gothic, dark fiction and horror stories and science fiction to boot, I'm also fond of halloween and apothecary potions and things that go bump in the night but its a little hard to fit those things in to most of the challenges. So I set dark enchantment as the theme to give myself the chance and also to see what others came up with. There were some fabby entries from a pair of earrings to an excellent Los Muertos (Day of the Dead) card which was the winning entry when hubby pulled a name from the hat.

The image is another one from the Crafters Companion 'Flights of Fantasy' CD, I really love the images on this CD and I've posted about it before with photos of some of the cards I've made using it. I printed the image off a few months ago and have been looking for an excuse to use it ever since.  The thing with printing off images is they don't sparkle as much as I'd like or have the bling factor, so to get round this I used a glue pen around the edges of the wings and sprinkled black nuyo pure sheen glitter on them. Everything is stick to a simple 5" x 7" cream card base.

My first layer on the card base is black card which I embossed then rubbed over the raised areas with silver and purple metallic gelato sticks. If you use gelato's or are thinking of using them but been but off by the price I have tip... I was looking for Gelato's on Amazon a few weeks back and came across Faber-Castell Gel Sticks they are aimed at children, but they are exactly the same as the Metallic Gelato's, same creamy texture, they blend with water just like Gelato's do and create wonderful shimmery backgrounds. The difference is if you buy the Gel Sticks, you get 6 metallic colours for around £6 whereas it costs around £9 for just 4 Metallic Gelato's and another £3.50 for the Gold & Silver Gelato sticks.

The flowers are from a pack of Dovecraft white paper flowers,  I coloured them with the same metallic purple gel stick I used on the background and then spritzed them with water to colour the flower more evenly. The edge of the flower was dipped in glue and sprinkled with Nuyo Glitter and a clear gem stone was added to the centre which I then coloured with a black promarker, I also used the promarker to give the petals a little veining.

I attached a piece of black organza ribbon to the card a couple of centimetres up from the bottom and stuck the flowers above and below the ribbon line. For the sentiment I die cut a small tag using black card and stamped a 'fairy wishes' sentiment with silver ink and added silver embossing powder, the sentiment came free with a card mag a while back and I've used it before on another dark fairy card. I die cut the butterfly with a die that came free with Creativity magazine using black card which was first treated with iridescent colours of perfect pearls, once die cut and placed I added another clear gemstone to the centre and coloured black. I'm on the hunt for more steampunk/gothic/vampire/dark enchantment style images and stamps to use for making cards, so if you have any suggestions or know of any suppliers please leave me a comment with the details. Thanks in advance :)