STACKED DIES – WARNING: Wordy & photo heavy.

Hi, everyone, it’s Charlotte C here.  Thank you, Sheila, for having me visit again this month.  Today I am sharing a technique that was recently posted by Jennifer McGuire.  I’m a fan and follower of this talented lady, and even though I didn’t have the dies she used, I decided to give it a whirl with what I had, namely, a set of 6 Classic Scallop Hearts from Spellbinders.  And the stacking of the dies before cutting gives you almost a one-layer card and cuts down on the weight of your card for mailing.  So here goes.

Using the second, fourth and six (largest) die from the set, I arranged them face down on my table and used repositionable tape to tape them together on the back, as you see here, so that now they work as one die. 

After running it through my die cutting machine several times with both patterned and plain card stock, I assembled the hearts like so, alternating the card stock. 

 I used repositionable tape on the back of the cut hearts to keep all the pieces together until I completed the next step.  I cut a heart from craft foam using the fifth size die and glued it on the back of my piece to give it some dimension on the card base when assembled.  Set that aside.

I used just the sixth (largest) die to cut a heart in the center of a 5” square piece of black card stock.  I created my 5 ½” square card base and used repositionable tape to temporarily adhere the black layer to the front of it.  

Now I glued down my main piece (the heart) in the center of the black square, and once that was in place, like a puzzle, I removed the black layer.  And there was a method to my madness – read on.  Card now looks like this.

On vellum, using a stamp or generated by computer, I put my sentiment to go across the front of the card.  I taped the vellum down to the back of the black layer   All I had to do now was run adhesive around the back of the black layer and fit it back on the card base.  These are two examples of how they turned out.

I know this is wordy and photo-heavy, but I don’t do videos and I wanted to be as clear as can be.  And there’s more (can you stand it?).  Did you know that if you print on vellum with an inkjet printer you can use embossing powder on it and get a raised effect?  That’s what I did for cards to my children.  The other card is a stamp that I embossed.   Vellum likes to warp when heated, so make sure your heat gun is turned on getting hot before you hit the vellum with it; cuts down on the warping tremendously.  Also, I used craft foam to pop up the center image, but you can use foam tape, or don’t bother popping it at all.  It’s up to you.

You can do this with any shape die sets and I hope you give it a try with what you have.

Thank you so much for joining us today.