We haven’t seen any butterflies since the temperature here started to yo-yo back and forth so, we made a cupcake liner sun catcher butterfly to remind us that spring is here. We can’t see the butterfly flitting around the yard, but we can see it superimposed over the view of our yard as we look out the window. Maybe when the temperature warms up we will be able see our sun catcher butterfly and a real live butterfly at the same time. I hope it warms up enough for that soon.

I cut out the outline of two butterflies and shapes on their wings. JDaniel could probably have traced my outline and done some cutouts himself, but I was inspired to do this after he had gone to bed one night.

The trickiest part was having the paper stay folded as I cut out the each shape. I didn’t want  to end up with lots of crease lines in the paper. Had JDaniel been awake he would have told me that wouldn’t matter or we could have taken turns holding the paper for each other.

I found a super fun set of cupcake liners when I went to JoAnn’s to get the materials for the Easter Egg Toss Bottles project. I knew that they would be thin enough to let light shine through them and colorful enough to make pretty sun catcher. They were also super easy to cut.

The tricky part about using the cupcake liners was that it was hard to cut them to fit the cutouts perfectly. The smaller cutouts were easy. It was the long cutouts at the top of the butterfly’s wings that offered a challenge. At first we tried to cut the outside edge of the cupcake liner to see if it would be long enough. It wasn’t long enough. The arch in the liner kept it from working. The only way to make it work was to layer to sections of cutout cupcake liners. We really weren’t sure how that would look, but it end up being okay.

A wonderful attribute of cupcake liners is that they have a smooth flat section and a fluted section. The areas we used the fluted section on ended up having a really wonderful texture to them. The texture wasn’t too noticeable, but was just enough to add a little bit of a funky flair to the craft.

Cupcake liners have been a wonderful crafting tool at our house. We have made a cupcake liner bouquet and pumpkin craft with them so far. I am thinking a decorated Easter egg may be in our future.

Here some other crafts and activities featuring butterflies we have done:

Science Experiment- Making Butterfly Wings Flap
Butterfly Number Count
Butterfly Bento

How have you used cupcake liners outside of making cupcakes or muffins with them?