Card making

 

Hello there my crafty friends! I have recently been quite obsessed with Spellbinders dies and I may have bought one or two sets… and I’ve been collecting Technique Tuesday dies and their Ali Edwards stamps too…. and yesterday I took a day off from work so naturally I stayed in my PJ’s all day (ALLLLLLLLL DAY!!!!! :) ) and crafted! 

I had to get the hang of some of the Spellbinders dies.  Look at this little lady I stamped.  It’s a Unity stamp and I used Copics to color her in… and I very unsuccessfully tried to use a Spellbinders die to cut a shape around her.  :(

 

I messed with the dies, added a shim, added a different shim, changed around the plates, looked at the Spellbinders website and their videos, checked out YouTube videos, and finally just called the company.  Guess what:  If the packaging says “INSET” next to the size of the die that means it DOES NOT CUT. It embosses, debosses, stencils, and letterpresses, but it does not cut.  It is to be used in conjunction with one of their Nestabilities sets, like so:

The die on the left is the Nestability die; the one on the right with all the hearts is an “inset” die, and it’s one of their new “Imperial Gold” collections.  I’m SO GLAD I got both sets!!!!!  O.o    Here’s the original die I was trying to use around my stamped girl.  This time I ran the embossing die first and then the cutting one after.  MUCH better result. 

I keep my dies in these nifty ArtBin containers.  The sheets are magnetic and oh-so-handy.  The container comes with three magnetic sheets and you can buy more sheets in packs of three; although you can probably fit about 21 sheets IN the container it will weigh far too much at that point… 15 sheets per container (if full with dies) is a good limit.

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And here is my finished card. From the original (the first picture of this post), I just hand-cut around the girl to get rid of the horrible edge that I had ruined.  Then I die-cut the actual frame, pop-dotting between the two, and finished it off with a Stampin’ Up! phrase—and I used the hearts from the other frame that I cut out. 

Just a little bit of dimension:  :)

Then, since I had that SU! stamp set out for my phrase, I decided to get out the matching hexagon punch and make another quickie card. 

Pigment ink wins again!  Here, I used CTMH inks with the SU! stamps—because my SU! inks are all in storage.  On the left is the pigment, on the right is dye.  I just love the pigment coverage WAY more, even with the image stamping in the center where it’s not supposed to. 

Here’s the finished card.  I used the same MME patterned paper from the card above, CTMH inks, the embossing of the white background is the CTMH quatrefoil embossing folder, and of course the stamps are SU!, as well as the ribbon.  The bitty pearls are CTMH.

Not to be outdone, I had to play with some Technique Tuesday dies too.  :)

 

Unfortunately, this card didn’t turn out as I had envisioned it in my head.  I think the colors are all wrong, or I shouldn’t have used black.  Oh well—I’ll try again with these dies another day.  I did stamp “happy birthday” on the inside of the card, and the embossing folder for my base is SU!. 

That’s it for now!  I’m going to a crop tonight and plan on working on some CTMH projects, so stay tuned for that. 

In other news, I have a major project coming up at work and if I do well then some big, huge, wonderful doors will be opening up for me, lots of professional opportunities.  Please pray for me to do well and for those opportunities to become available!  As always, please pray for His will to be done, not mine, that I go where He wants and that I do what He wants.  ;)  Thank you!!!

 

Blessings,

Martha