AECP Family Hop

Hi crafty friends!

Today I am joining my fellow AECP participants and Educators in a fun filled Instagram hop. I think all of us in the Altenew Educator Certification Program would agree that our AECP classes have expanded our creativity and enhanced our card making skills. I know I have learned so many new techniques and approaches to card projects and have been connected to so many other talented crafters along the way!

One of my favorite classes was Easy Die Cutting Techniques. As my blog name suggests, I love to get inky! I had been stamping and coloring for quite a while before I started my AECP journey, but I was a relative beginner with die cutting and was just getting familiar with it. So this class was an eye opener for me – it is loaded with ideas for using dies in creative and unexpected ways! For today’s project, I wanted to showcase some of those awesome techniques.

To get started, I cut thin strips of cardstock from scraps I had on hand. I chose lots of bright fun colors to create a rainbow.

I covered a 4.25″ x 5.5″ piece of typing paper with adhesive and started laying down my strips side by side, leaving no gaps. Once I had the whole thing covered, I trimmed the overhanging strips.

I grabbed my Mega Happy die and arranged it across my striped background. I love this die because it is so big and impactful that it stands on its own across the cardfront!

After running it through my Big Shot, I had both the positive and negative die cuts and they are equally beautiful! I couldn’t decide which to use, so I ended up using them both!

With the negative space, I trimmed a little off the top and bottom and then went a little crazy adding foam tape behind the whole piece, including all the little delicate areas between the letters. Of course, remember to save the “insides” of the letters so you can replace them if you want to. I temporarily laid my die cut word back into the negative space to get the alignment of the innards just right. All of this was popped up on an A2 landscape card leaving a little white trim at the top and bottom.

To finish my sentiment, I stamped “birthday” from the Mega Greetings 2 stamp set in Versamark ink on black cardstock and heat embossed it in white. While I had that set up in my Misti, I stamped it multiple times so that I could emboss them all at once, cut them into strips, and have lots of “birthday” card strips handy for future projects.

I added one of those strips to my card with a few clear sequins and that was all it took to complete this colorful bright birthday card!

So here’s my first card utilizing the negative space from our die cut. I think it is such a fun cheerful card that is perfect for any age or gender!

I couldn’t let that positive space go to waste, though….

I grabbed another one of my embossed “birthday” sentiment strips and left this one long enough to span the whole width of the card. I adhered it to the cardfront toward the bottom leaving space for my “happy” die cut. I added another thin strip of black cardstock toward the top of the card to balance it out and then ran really thin strips of silver glitter cardstock alongside both of them to give this card some extra pizzazz.

For dimension and added interest, I die cut the Mega Happy die again from black fun foam and adhered my colorful die cut to the black one, but I offset it just a bit to let the black foam peek out like a drop shadow.

This card had everything going for it – colorful stripes, dimension, a little bling, heat embossing… so I left well enough alone and called it done!

I had so much fun creating these cards and implementing some of the techniques that I am learning on my AECP journey. Die cutting gives you twice the bang for the buck because you get both the positive and negative images to work with! Win-Win!