A few tricks to cutting intricate pieces in your eCraft

 

A few months ago, Lettering Delights released a Cut-Its Set called Bloomeria and I immediately purchased it.  Even though I loved it, I had trouble figuring out just what I wanted to do with it.  Then I saw the new Summer Seasonal Distress Inks from Tim Holtz.  These three ink colors are a limited edition and they are bright and bold colors.  I fell in love with these colors and that is all it took to inspire another birthday card to add to my inventory.  On top of that, the card came together SO quickly!

Now, I am going to tell you that this was a tricky file to cut, BUT it is not impossible!  So if you run across a file like this and you have trouble getting it to cut well, I am going to share with you a few tips and tricks that I used to get this to cut.  First, because there are so many interior pieces that are cutting, I used BOTH a veggie mat stabilizer and tabs.  The veggie mat stabilizer helps to keep the paper in the rollers tight and the tabs keep those interior cut outs in place.  If you cut this without the tabs, those interior pieces will most likely come loose and then you have a good chance of one of those pieces getting caught under the blade trolley and that is a recipe for a bunch of shredded paper!!  With a file like this, you can kind of imagine how much the eCraft rollers and blade trolley have to move around to get everything to cut, so because I figured that this file would take a while to cut and with all that movement of the rollers and the blade trolley and that means that there is a great chance of the paper slipping even with the veggie mat, so I added a little temporary spray adhesive (I like Quilt basting spray) to the back of the paper before I placed it on the veggie mat.  DO NOT spray your veggie mat with the adhesive!!  That adhesive will gum up your rollers.  The other thing that I did was check my pressure to make sure that I used the lowest possible pressure.  To do that, you need to feed some of your cutting paper in and just test the setting using a small shape that has lots of twists and turns in it.  I like to use the tree from the Fundamentals 1 SD card.  Since we are going to cut with the veggie mat, we cannot rely on the blue light, so we have to test the pressure manually.  I start with a pressure that I think will work.  If it cuts cleanly, I lower the pressure a 1/2 step and cut again to see if I get the same results.  If the cut does not come out of your paper, then you need to increase the pressure.  Once you get a sense of what pressure setting will work on which paper, these test cuts go pretty quick and with minimal waste.  I don’t do this for every cut, just the ones that I think will be tricky like this one.

 

So now that I have my veggie mat prepared, and the pressure settings figured out, I’m ready to cut. Using my favorite eCraft Diecutable Cardstock (White Flour) into my trusty purple eCraft and then have it start cutting out my Bloomeria cut.  While it was cutting I took another piece of white cardstock and did the Wrinkle Free Distress technique using the gorgeous Summer colors of Picked Raspberry, Mowed Lawn and Salty Ocean.  Look how pretty that came out!!!  And the purple color that was created in there is even more gorgeous in person.

After my eCraft was finished cutting, I stamped my sentiment from Papertrey Ink Cupcake Collection onto the cut using the Salty Ocean color. Then all I had to do was add some dimensional adhesive to the back of the die cut and then layer it onto my Summer Distress background. 

After I made this card, I started to imagine it in other color combinations and the possibilities are endless!  What colors would you pick?