Tuesday, August 31, 2010

The Beauty of the Cardstock Stabilizer!

Ok, so for starters...what is the cardstock stabilizer?  Simply put it is a piece of regular ordinary cardstock that can serve as a "mat" only without the sticky messy adhesive.  To use it, you simply place the paper that you want to cut on top of the cardstock stabilizer and then feed both papers into the eCraft.

Why is this such a beautiful thing?  Well so far, I have not found that I need to have any tab settings when using it.  That means the cut just falls out of the paper.  Check out my video on cutting vellum to see this method in action.  I decided to take some of my thinnest patterned papers and see how well they cut with the cardstock stabilizer.  I found that all of these papers cut well using a pressure setting of 5.  When the cuts are done, you may see an indentation of the blade on the cardstock, but it did not cut through the cardstock at all, so that piece of cardstock can be re-used.

Here are some pictures of the papers that I cut using this method.


This is from the Paper Studio


This is from Paper Pizazz


This is from DCWV, smooth finish


This is from Cloud 9 Design, Seasonal Paper Pack


This is from K&Company

I am going to keep testing out the cardstock stabilizer to see if my theory holds true.  If you find an occassion when you have to set tabs when using the cardstock stabilizer, please let me know.  So far, it seems like there is no need for tabs when using it, so let's cut away!

I want to give another shout out to Nicole at Nick's Cardstock Creations, as far as I know, she was the first to demonstrate this technique!  Check out her post about this method HERE.

3 comments:

Linda de Bruin said...

hello Denise,

I'am following youre blog from the Netherlands and read this post on de stabilizer. Is this a normal piece of cardstock? I can't find a special "stabilizer" article with this name in Dutch shops. So I wandered.

Greatings, Linda

Denise O'Connor said...

Hi Linda!

Greetings from the USA! Yes the cardstock stabilizer is just a regular piece of cardstock. Make sure you check out Nicki's video, it is a great demonstration of how this works. I have to say that I find myself using it whenever possbile so that I can cut without the tabs!

Jonathanff said...

can you use a stabilizer on the ecraft via paper feed tray?

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