More from Less

I don't know about you but lockdown has made me think about how I can make the most of what I have - sometimes I'm guilty of getting a stamp or die, doing one card with it and putting it away.   I'm sure I'm not the only one.  So with the projects I've been doing each Sunday I've been challenging myself to make at least 3 looks with whatever product is the main focus of my make and this week I'm doing it wtih a die, that at first glance you might not think you can do that many different things with, but as with any background die, you just need to look at them a little differently to make the most of them.

The Dotted Starburst Debossing Cover Die is a dotted texture background die that can add a lot of interest to the background of a simple card and you can see lots of examples of that on the product page in the store.  However I wanted to think outside of the box for other uses and it was just screaming dot-to-dot to me so for my first card I created a dot-to-do rainbow.  I started in the middle and just took a really sharp red pencil and traced the lines on the smallest petals, then moving out with orange, yellow etc etc.  I decided to add colour to the centre as there are less dots per petal so it wasn't very bold.  I stamped the sentiment from a Waffle Flower set straight over the top in black.

I took that one step further by creating a layered mandala style flower by running the die 4 times on 4 different coloured cards and cutting them out.  The purple layer is not perfect as I decided to eyeball it - NOT a good idea with a complex pattern.  So for the pink layer down I lightly drew in pencil so I could easily see where I was cutting.

I then just glued it down flat but you could go further and curl up the petals for a more 3D look by just gluing the centres of each layer.   The sentiment this time is from Anything But Basic Encouragement from MFT which is a really handy set in the current situation we're in.

I wanted to see how the die would look on an already textured paper, so I ran it through the machine with some Lawn Fawn pearl cardstock which has a linen style texture as well as a pearly finish.  It turned out really pretty, so to make it more interesting I did it again with another colour, cut both into quarters and made two cards with them.

Now my top to bottom cuts were perfect - BUT, my cuts across the middle were out by a couple of millimeters so they didn't line up perfectly - but that this NOT a reason to chuck them, it just means you get creative to cover up the mistake!

For the first one I just used a simple contrasting strip of paper and popped a die cut sentiment from the Waffle Flower Simple Said One sets on top - a handy hello for anytime.  I like to keep a stash of hello cards to hand.

I wanted to show you can cover up with stamping too - I trimmed the panels so they met perfectly but to cover the fact that the dots don't line up I stamped over the top with leaves from the Leaf Cluster stamp set from Altenew.   As this situation also means we need more sympathy cards I decided to make this into one with a sentiment from Waffle Flower's Rainbow Bridge.

NEWS FORM THE STORE

The coronovirus is hitting hard in the USA, and is almost impossible to get any new stock.  We are working on it, and hope to have some soon but we have no eta's on anything at the moment.  We will let you know as soon as we get any concrete information but many of this months releases are on hold and it may be that many of the May releases are delayed too.

Catch you next week

Tara