Fantastic tutorial...

I was browsing some blogs earlier and came across an awesome tutorial for making your own stitching templates. To see the entire post, you can visit Melissa's blog here. She explains how to take a shape you want to stitch, trace it onto some acetate, and then pierce holes into it to use it as your template. Is that smart or what?? :)

Well, I was sitting here trying to think of a way I could try it out today (no acetate sheets yet)and an idea popped into my head. A few weeks ago, I went through and put a bunch of my single clear stamps into CD cases. A few of these were the individual word stamps that are in Heidi Swapp's handwriting. They come in a plastic package, stuck to a piece of acetate that has the word written on it. When I took the stamps out of the package, I kept those words thinking I could use them for something later on. Boy, am I happy that I did!

I pulled them out and chose a word, grabbed my paper piercer, and went to work piercing the holes. Next I cut down a piece of paper to the size I wanted it, held the acetate in place over it, and once again pierced the holes, but this time through the acetate to the paper. After that, I stitched the word. It worked great!! Here's a picture of the acetate and also the stitched word...





I have 3 more of the Heidi Swapp words and also a few other designs that might work for this, so I can't wait to try them out. I'm also definitely going to get some acetate sheets so that I can try Melissa's idea.
You should try it too! ;)

Card sketch book...

Have you ever wished you had a cool little book to draw your card sketches in? Well, now it's possible! Kristina Werner created a wonderful PDF that you can download and print to create your own sketch book. How cool is that?!? You can find the post about it on her blog here. She even made a video of her creating a book so that you can do it step-by-step right along with her. I created one last night...

Supplies: K&Company Paper Pad - Greenhouse; Doodlebug Loopy Lou Cardstock Stickers - Bon Bon; American Crafts Clear Alphabet Stamps - Ginger; Colorbox Chalk Ink - Chestnut Roan; EK Success Corner Punch

I really love it! Now if we can only talk her into doing a PDF for layout sketches...hmmmmmm. ;)

One note...in the video Kristina uses a pivot point stapler to put her book together. She says that if you don't have one, you can just use a regular stapler opened up, laying against a soft pillow or cushion. Then, once you push your staples into place, you can just turn the book over and flatten the prongs yourself. That's exactly what I did, but I used an old mouse pad instead and it worked perfectly. Just sharing... :)