2 and 1/2 weeks as an Independent Stampin' Up! Demonstrator or why you will want the Envelope Punch Board

I have loved my 1st 2 weeks as an independent Stampin' Up! demonstrator. Its fantastic working with such amazing products and my favorite one of all is the envelope punch board.

Now before last night I was already in love with it. I love the envelopes  bows and boxes you can make with it. But last night it became my favorite purchase ever. I have always been disappointed with corner punches. What is the point of only rounding 2 corners on a card. As corner punches could only ever punch through one layer of card.

Last night I was making the above project using Spring Fever kit Digital download To buy please click image below which will take you to the item in my shop.

Table built using Product Table Builder by The Crafty Owl - Independent Stampin' Up! Demonstrator.

When I started to round the corners of my tiny 6cm wide card. I started to punch the corners  of the 250gsm card individually as that's always what I had always had to do. Then I got to the fold and thought £darn I'll have to trace round the balbearing game then trim them off  "I wonder" , I placed the 250gsm folded corner in the corner punch and pow down it went, straight through , No problem"!

 Ta da along comes the Envelope Punch board and all my corners are now rounded. Not just any card corners but card corners made with 250gsm card. Unbelievable, now rounded corner cards are going to be appearing everywhere!

Anyway here is a close up of the project.

I had these little balbearing games left over from my grandsons birthday party last year. As we were doing some spring cleaning I came across them. I am going to use the round  ones on large cards as central feture, and try to make little triangular cards with the triangles. As soon as I saw them I thought. Ohh you could make a cute little card with these if you could get the backs off. You can by them on  Ebay.

So a little while later after a few failures I found the best way to do it.

You need one of those tiny spectacle screwdrivers.
Place it in the edge of the ballbearing game and wiggle wiggle wiggle (didn't somebody write a song?) Anyway I did this all the way round. ( Know you now have images of me holding the ballbearing gameand the screwdriver doing the Wiggle,Wiggle,Wiggle, I apologize not a great image!
Then I gently raised each centre, then slid the tip of screwdriver slowly across to each corner. You may get little nibbles in the plastic but as its going to be glued and covered so don't worry, even a crack in the back isn't going to effect the end result.

I then measured the ballbearing game's card insert.

 I set up a custom page in My Digital Studio 5.5 cm square. (but you can use your own usual image  editing softwear)
 Everything above is from The standard cardstock installed on MDS and the Spring Fever kit except the green embellishment behind the pink embellishment with the hello in the far left card,  unfortunatly I can't remember which kit that's out of as soon as I do I'll put the details in.

  I then designed the panel  Using Melon Mambo MDS Cardstock as the backgound,

Envelope Punch Board

I took the Spring Fever -Bunny 1 embellishment from the Spring fever kit and cropped it to just the Bunny and then did the same but cropped to the Daisy. Leaving me with 2 embellishments .

Place the Spring Fever -Bunny 1 in the centre. Enlarge the daisy and place to the left.  Then I took another daisy cropped so I only had the leaves and stem. Then added Spring Fever , embellishment Flower 10 and 11. Those are the polka dot heads. I cropped one of the stems shorter , and mirrored the stem on one and angled the head on the other. I then selected everything and added a shadow . Then  finished with the Spring Fever- Dream Big stamp. Thats one thing I love about digital, no matter what size your project the stamp fits.


I put the panels back in the ball bearing game. Then glued with a few dabs of superglue.



To make the card back I used a  piece of 250gm cardstock (because the ballbearing games are a bit heavy) and trimmed to  6cm by 12 cm scored at 6cm and then folded. Punched ALL 4 CORNERS (Yippe!!!) with the Envelope Punch Board. Adhered to back of game with Hi-tack glue.

To buy please click the image of the required item below which will take you to the item in my shop.

Table built using Product Table Builder by The Crafty Owl - Independent Stampin' Up! Demonstrator.

I printed both sides of an A4 sheet of Whisper White cardstock. One with the striped paper from the Spring Fever kit and then printed the reverse with Melon Mambo digital cardstock (from the cardstock basics installed on MDS).

Then I cut a 129mm by 129mm  peice of the printed double-sided cardstock and with the Envelope Punch Board,  punched and scored at 59 and 70 on all sides, to make the boxelope.

Fold on all the score lines.  Then put tape on the bottom edges of the side flaps and positioned the side and borrom flaps, to make the box envelope, then used the corner rounder on the top of the evelope flap.

I cut a strip of the striped paper 3 cm wide by 14cm long. Folded it in half and punched one cm each way from the center top and bottom to create the band and closure around the middle .

I had some wooden buttons so I  coloured the center of the button with the Melon Mambo marker. Looks  less blotchy in real life. Attached the button with hi tack glue to the band then attached the band at the back with tape.

So I hope you like my mini card with a big difference

Rattytatty

When I saw this photo I just had to scrap it

Its a stunningly funny and adorable photo. I knew just what I wanted to do with it. Anyway I used MDS to recolor papers and used the ink splatters  which come with MDS ( in my opinion MDS is worth buying for the stamp colouring tool and the Stampin up punches and kits already installed, but what Im not sure you know is that you can use Stampin' Up downloads in any editing softwear. Yep can you believe it access to all those wonderful Stampin' Up! goodies even if you are used to using the much more complex Photoshop, Photoshop elements and other editing programs like Serif Craft Artist. ) I then exported everything into my usual editing softwear and did the rest,

I used Venetian Romance papers. I have used these for loads of things everytime I look at them I think of new ideas. Autumn elements stamp and brush set and the ink splatters installed in MDS.

The reason  I bought My Digital Studio even though I am used to advanced programs like Photoshop was because it came with loads of the Stampin' Up goodies installed. You don't have to buy MDS to buy all the new downloads as they come in jpg format. But some of the punches don't. So having MDS means you can use those too I just export as jpg and use in my other programs.

What I used to create the layout

Table built using Product Table Builder by The Crafty Owl - Independent Stampin' Up! Demonstrator.

Because I am very new at Stampin' Up! a lot of my money is going on building my business which means I am not able to buy all the kits I want,

So tommorow  I will post a list of my 10 ten most wanted kits and let anyone who wants too vote on which is their favorite and the 3 kits with the most votes will be what I buy next. Careful voting people.