Would you believe that I just LOST my crown stamp for this Honeybees set? Accckkk! It was sitting on my desk an hour ago, and now it has vanished-- probably into a parallel universe. . . ;-D I thought that I'd better get my PTI Blog Hop piece posted even without the Queen Bee's crown.
I also photographed a tutorial on cutting windows with Spellbinders dies, but I need to take a meal to someone right now. I'll come back late tonight and amend this post to include the tutorial. Happy Blog Hopping!
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For the last PaperTrey Ink release, I had used my Spellbinders dies to cut a window in both a card front and a mat. I had several questions on how to line them up, so I said that I'd try to illustrate. I thought I'd show you grid-scoring one more time as well.
First, since I'm making a square card, I used a ruler to draw an "x" across the card front to determine the center point. That helps me to know exactly where to place my die--no guessing! I used tape across the center of the die to hold my die in place since that part will be cut out anyway.
You'll have to take my word for it that the square is embossed as well as cut out. I will erase the lines now.
Here I simply held the Lemon Zest cardstock firmly and scored every half inch in a grid pattern, turning the cardstock as I went. I scored the lines nearest the center of the square first because I wanted to stop my lines 1/2" short of the inner square to frame it. When I am scoring a grid and need to be able to see exactly where I am stopping an starting, I find it simplest to use an embossing stylus to score with; it's easier to see where the point is with a stylus than with the provided scoring tool for this particular application. Even using an embossing stylus, if you enlarge the picture, you will see that I went over the line in a few places--no problem! You simply turn your grid over to the front side (as shown above), and use that embossing stylus to carefully burnish the little overruns down flat.
As you can see above, while the lines aren't perfect in the center, they are better after the tweaking maneuver.
Next comes the window: to line up your inner window and your outer window, first make sure that your top mat fits your card base and has equal margins all around. If it doesn't, fix that. Then place a light pencil mark around the inside perimeter of the square.
I moved the Lemon Zest mat so that you could see my penciled line. The penciled line is the same size as my next smaller diameter Spellbinders Classic Square die is. (The full set gives you 1/8" increments.)
I will once again tape my die across the center so that it can't slip.
I don't have to worry about removing the tape since I am discarding the
center piece anyway. I will simply cut and emboss this piece, and both the mat and the card base are lined up--simple!
Newsflash: I just found the crown! It was stuck to my Scor-Pal--the ONE place that I hadn't looked. Woohoo!
