Something Old, Something New

Playing along with the new challenge at Less is More, "Bring Something Back." I thought this was a great opportunity to use the very first stamp set I ever bought, "Long Stemmed" from Stampin' Up! 

When my daughter, Bridget was planning her wedding back in 2003, my daughter-in-law, Kristen was a Stampin' Up! demonstrator. I was crafty, my daughter was pinching pennies, and Kristen offered a family discount, so I volunteered to make the place cards for the reception. I had never stamped before, but hey, I was crafty so I knew it all, right? I bought the only stamp set that featured a calla lily small enough for the place cards. The only problem was the sentiment "Calla Lily" written along the stems and would not fit with my place card design. 

It pains me to say that no, I did not know everything, particularly the trick of masking, so I did the unthinkable while thinking I was using common sense: I took a razor knife to the sentiment. Ouch! As you can see, the cut wasn't perfect and as a result the stems did not stamp perfectly either.

But I managed to hide my rookie error, can't really remember how. I think I had the guests names cutting across the injured stem. For today's card, though I used a few of my new dies, and some of my increased stamping knowledge to frame just the top parts of the flowers, disguising the fact that they had been ruthlessly slashed!

One of the new techniques I've discovered is stacking die cuts to make them pop out. This is really effective with sentiments, like the one above. The most challenging part of this technique, though, can be lining up the die cuts so they stack evenly. I use a cool trick that works every time. 

Once a die cut has adhesive applied, I stack it on top of the previous cut and use my Tweezer Bee on one or two of the largest letters to align them. The cool thing about this kind of tweezer is that you pinch it to open, place it on a letter, then let it close by itself. It pulls both layers together. Result? Perfectly aligned, stacked die cuts!


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