Hello friends, I am getting closer to completing the first level of Altenew Educator Certification Program. I so thrilled to announce that there is only one more class left, and if everything goes to plan, I will be finishing tomorrow or Saturday the latest. Hopefully I will start the new week with a new level. But, until then, let me show you what I created for you today.

Today’s lesson is about die easy cutting techniques and I have something super special for all of you who like to stretch their supplies and get more for your buck.

I created two cards for you today. One of them is simpler and easier to make, so I am going to start with that one.

I really liked how hot foil looked with the Dotted Swirl Die ( I used this in the post from couple of days ago LET IT SHINE, and you can check it out here) so I decided to do it again. As you can see, sometimes it happens that a little bit of excess foil gets on the paper. To remove it I used a sand eraser by Tombow Mono and it works great! It will definitely not damage your paper. I then used Spectrum Noir alcohol markers to color my embossed image. I apologize for not capturing this, but I just flipped over my paper and I colored my image on the back. I then used a Quickie Glue Pen to glue my vellum piece to the card. This is a great way to attach vellum to your cards and the glue will not show. What I realized by making these cards is that the adhesive in these pens is quite strong and it will definitely hold your vellum. After that I added the sentiment and the card was complete.

Moving to the card No.2. Now this card might seem more complicated but, trust me it is super easy. And, as I promised, I am going to show you how to stretch your supplies and start looking at your dies in another way.

This card is a slimline card (approximately 4×9) and I first started off by cutting the card base and the the gold paper to size. As you can see the frame die that I used to create this card is pretty small for my slimline card so I had to do some partial die cutting and I did this in three steps. Before I explain what I did here, you need to remember ( this is of you don’t know this already) that the die will only cut the paper if both plates are covering it. That being said, let’s begin. STEP 1: I made sure that my top plate didi not cover the complete die. That way when the plates go through the die cutting machine the die will not cut the paper. STEP 2: I carefully aligned the die to the already cut piece to make sure that the piece looks like it is continuing. The best way yo achieve this is to overlap the die with the cuts. This step might be a little bit complicated and the most challenging, but trust me, once you do it you will realize that is not that hard. I first secured the die on the paper with some wash tape and moved it off the plate just enough so the edge of the die was not covered by both plates and put the top plate enough to cover just the middle of the die. This gave me about 3/4″ more length. STEP 3: And the final step, I finished it by covering only the bottom part of the die. And this completed my die cut. As you can see it not that hard.

Next it was time for some heat embossing on vellum. BIG TIP: When embossing on vellum there are three things that are crucial and super important: 1. always use heavy weight vellum, at least 40 lbs; 2. always use anti static powder or baby powder to prepare your paper before embossing; 3. make sure that your heat gun is super hot. I simply stamped my image with VersaMark ink and sprinkled it with gold embossing powder. And once that was done, it was time to add some color to this image. I repeated the same steps as I did with the previous card: I flipped the vellum over and colored the image on the back and then I glued it with a Quickie Glue Pen. To attach the super intricate and delicate die cut I use a ruler and a Quickie Glue Pen to “draw” a perfect staring line of glue to ensure my die cut is straight. I then glued everything to the card base and the card was done!

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So I used quite similar techniques for these two cards and I hope you learned something today and that you will try some of these techniques yourself. If you do, please let me know how it worked, I’d love to know.

Thank you for visiting me today and see you soon with another post.