Thursday, September 11, 2008

Say it with scallops - larger mat tutorial

Here's another card we'll be making at this month's stamp camp on September 20. Would you believe this whole card uses only one stamp? Looks pretty good, doesn't it? It just goes to show, you don't need a lot of stamps if you have the right accessories.

On this card I started with a kiwi kiss base, then wrapped some baja breeze double stitched ribbon around the front so that the raw edges would be hidden under the front panel. I then attached a piece of the Muirfield double sided designer series paper to a piece of whisper white card stock, added a pacific point mat and attached the whole panel to my card base. Next I punched two large stars out of baja breeze and pacific point card stock and attached them to each other, offsetting the points. I punched a hole in the center through which I inserted a 3/8" star brad from the styled silver hodgepodge hardware collection, and attached the star over the front panel with a dimensional. Finally, I stamped the congrats sentiment from the Say it With Scallops set in pacific point ink on whisper white card stock and punched it out with the scalloped square punch.

I liked the card so far, but I wanted a scalloped mat for the sentiment, so I decided to make one using my scalloped square punch. And since some of you asked me how I did this back when I made this Dreams du Jour card, I decided to do a quick tutorial.

Take the card stock in the color of your desired mat. Punch on whole scalloped square and three sides measuring just 2 scallops on one side and all scallops on the other. (If you wanted a bigger mat you could have 3 or even 4 scallops per shorter side).


Attach one of the smaller sides to the full square by overlapping the last scallop on the full square with the scallops on the smaller piece, so that your composite is now 1 scallop longer than the full punched square.

Next attach the other smaller piece to the longer side of the new scalloped rectangle as shown in photo.


Finally, attach the third piece so that all the sides are now 6 scallops long, as shown in photo.
The reverse side of this "mat" will look like this photo. I prefer to attach my stamped piece to this reverse side. For some reason the "joints" between all the pieces don't seem as prominent to me on this side.

As a final step just adhere your stamped piece over your mat. From far away the joints are almost invisible, and even up close you have to be looking for them to find them. This technique is a really good way to introduce some more color to your scalloped squares, adn you could take it one step further by adding yet another bigger mat.

Hope you enjoyed the tutorial!

1 comment:

Kari said...

Great card!! I am going to have to try that scallop square mat! I did try the curly label mat on a card and loved it! I would have never have thought to just cut the stamped image a little bit smaller!! Thanks so much for the great tips!! :O)