Sunday 23 October 2016

Getting The Most From Layering Dies

I thought I'd highlight one of the new layering die sets from Altenew today as they are quite an innovative product.  You can find them all in the store using the new "filtering" system which we are working on brand by brand - if you see it on the left hand side of the page then it has been done for that brand.  If it's not there - we're working on it ;-)   If you click that link you will see that under the brand page of Altenew I have selected "layering" under theme and that shows you all the layering products be they stamps (and their co-ordinating dies), stencils or standalone dies.   You can select further options to reduce the number of results.  You can also search on themes such as birthday/family/pets so hopefully it will help you find specific themes across all brands as you need them.

Anyway, back to the crafting - for my makes today I used the Floral Layering Dies and wanted to show how you can get different results from them if you get a bit creative.


For the first card I went for a 70s vibe with my colours and simply cut Plate A from orange card stock and Plate B from yellow.  To get the second shade of yellow I drew around the flowers on the layer I'd cut from plate B onto a darker shade of yellow and trimmed just inside the pencil lines with scissors.  This gave me extra tone to my flowers and allowed the green from the background to show in the leaves and "gaps" only.   Finished with a sentiment embossed onto green and layered over the top.


For the second card I went with just simply layered Plates A and B using two shades of pink card onto a white background, but for a different look I just snipped off the leaves so you just have the beautiful flowers and a nice space to tuck in a sentiment.  The sentiments I've used came from Hero Art's Birthday Messages, one of my favourite of the moment as its a great mix of words and fonts (especially if like me you cut the bigger sentiments up for mix and match possibilities!)


For the third card I actually wanted to make a birthday card for my Mum so wanted something a bit fancy.  I decided to go for 3 layers with copic colouring.  I die cut Plate A from black card stock and then Plate B from white and had a second white layer read to go too.  I coloured Plate B using two shades of pink markers flicking the darker colour out from the edges of each "hole" on the die cut and fading it out to the edges of where the petals go (if you keep laying plate A on top you can see where the petals end and leaves begin).  I did the same thing with the 4 leaves in a couple of shades of green.



To get my colour in the correct place on the base layer I made myself a little quick cheat.  I die cut plate B from a thin sheet of paper, taped it with washi and used darker shades of pink and green as appropriate to colour through the gaps.   Once layered up this gives you a much fuller and more realistic looking floral image and its not too faffy if you use the paper stencil (you could create a stencil to colour through plate A onto plate B too).   The Mum word sentiment is from a new die set from Sugar Pea Designs which will be online soon ;-)

For the final card I wanted to experiment to see if you could use the dies for a double-debossing look and you can!

I simply ran both dies through my die cutter using a rubber mat in the sandwich on 300gsm white card stock one after the other (its easy to line them up with the outer cut line).   Once debossed I used some water soluble oil pastel crayons to provide an all over colour and make the debossed lines pop more.  Lightly rub them and blend gently - a bit like brass rubbings you did as a kid!  Finished with a die cut hello sentiment and a grey matt.


NEWS FROM THE STORE

  • We now have the new release from Sugar Pea Designs and are working on adding it to the store.
  • We hope to finally get time to get the tonic restocks onto the store this week too.
  • There are new releases pending for early may from Lil' Inker Deisgns, Waffle Flower Crafts, Neat & Tangled and of course MFT.
  • Lawn Fawn have just announced a list of retiring products ahead of their upcoming new release in late May.  We will add the retiring products to our discontinued page shortly - once they're gone they're gone!






No comments:

Post a Comment

Thanks for taking the time to leave a comment - we hope the blog inspires your creativity.
The Seven Hills Crafts Design Team