Friday, July 19, 2013

Stretching your dies.... or should that be shrinking your dies?

Did you know that you can adapt your dies to change their size?

No... neither did I till I took a look at a recent blog post from Sheila (here)

I asked her if I could share some of the post here and being the generous  person she is... she said okay!

So here is a great tip for getting the most of your dies.

" I also am still experimenting with stretching my dies.  I love a square card and have many square images like the one I used today but not many square dies.....at least the square dies I do have are never big enough for most of my images.  BUT! I do have lots of fancy rectangular dies.....and it took me the longest time and seeing many examples online before I put it together that other people were retrofitting their rectangular dies to fit a square card.  Duh!  So, it is a little more futsy than just cutting a die and placing it on the card but in the long run I like the results and more importantly I like that I can use my dies for more than one look!  So far I have only used rectangles but think that I can also use other shaped dies for this purpose.  My "mind's eye" doesn't see the possibilities right away so it takes me a bit to configure the dies....almost like working with a puzzle.


Today's card uses a large rectangular die from Spellbinders.  I cut it down quite a bit to get the square size that I wanted.  Then, I matched up the edging design and glued them down.  It is really hard to see the "seam" on this die but even so I decided to cover the seam with the ribbon."

Here is the card Sheila created


and this is a card showing the full die that Sheila "retrofitted"


 5 x 7 Detailed Scallops
So thanks Sheila for sharing this great tip.  I am certainly going to try out this technique.


2 comments:

Arlene said...

Dawn and Sheila!

Thank you both for sharing. I've been sitting here not stretching my dies. Fabulous!

Cindy C. said...

Awesome!! Never would have thought of that! TFS!