Felt + Cuttlebug!

This post is for Leslie!

I'm going to try and show the marriage of felt and Cuttlebug, but not really do a tutorial. How much tutoring is to be done really? Here are a few pics to try and show the thickness of my felt.



See, not super duper thick, but certainly different than paper. I ran mine through my Cuttlebug with the regular sandwich. I'm not sure how many times it needs to be run through as you can't see if it successfully cut all the way through without disassembling the sandwich. Unlike paper you do not see cut lines when it is actually cut. Running it through once was insufficient, but I just run it through 5 or 6 times and it is definitely cut then!

Here are a few little shapes cut out from my Nestabilities. Layer, add a button, suddenly it's a flower! You'll confuse bees everywhere!

At the end, you get cool cut out shapes like this little frame.

Ok, I'm including this weird shot to show how you do in fact get some embossing on the felt. Enlarging it might help.

I have lots of felt from Mom, so I'm hoping to make more using it when I eventually get more dies. In the meantime, I think it makes for a nice backing layer for journaling spots- next post will have mini album pics showing how I did just that!

Next post will take a little while- I need to retake all my pics in an attempt to balance enough light with not having glare. All of a sudden I feel compelled to take nice pictures. Curses!

For Randy

My co-worker Randy was fascinated by the ATG when I explained what it was to him, and was quite surprised by the need for that much adhesive, so this post is for him.

This is my ATG. It is quite large, but is lightweight and easy to maneuver. It has a pretty new 36 yd roll of adhesive tape in it.

Here is my box of 12 refill rolls, along with the other refill I still had. So that's 13 rolls of 36 yards of adhesive each. Not too shabby.

See how little space each roll takes up? The is another fine reason to use an ATG- no ridiculous pop-in refills and all their excess packaging to store.

See this cute little box? It sites on my craft table.

For kicks, I am saving all my empty plastic rolls in there. I got my gun in January and as you can see have gone through 4 rolls- that's with taking a substantial crafting hiatus this year. You can once again see how little waste this type of adhesive refill creates.

Here is the project I have been working on and wound up using some absurd quantity of adhesive on. It's still unfinished, so I don't have many photos of it. The black strips you see up top? Those are the base of each page- black chipboard. Chipboard is a fancy name for a specific flavor of cardboard, but it's basically fancy cardboard.

Here are the first two pages- do you see how they are completely covered? Each page is like that. There is not actual black showing except on the cover. Because everything is exposed to fingers, it needs to be thoroughly secured which means lots of tap. Let's also acknowledge the many layers we see here.

So you see, the ATG is glorious for several reasons, and it's certainly something I feel I got my money out of. Which is a good thing, because seriously? $40 for a tape dispenser? I too thought that was over the top lunacy. But I love that sucker as much as one can love a tape dispenser (which apparently is quite a lot).

Stickiness and some cards

First thing first, I got my ATG! Here is a picture comparing it to some of my other adhesives. It's a biggie for sure.
I had read before that there is a learning curve to using this sucker. When I read that, I of course thought, 'what the heck is there to learn, you roll on glue???' Well, turns out, they're not lying. You have to be careful when you finish rolling out adhesive and go to remove it- you have to be sure to pull back firmly and not up. The adhesive sticks to itself better than anything else, so it's natural inclination is to stay attached to the rest of the adhesive that you are currently moving far away from your project, so it is imperative that you effectively break the string of adhesive.

So there you go- learning curve.

In addition to playing with tape, I also made some cards! I received a Cuttlebug recently but had not yet had a chance to test it out. I purchased a few embossing folders and dies also, and was stoked to use them.

Here is a card I made using the swiss dot embossing folder and a cute heart die along with oval nestabilities. I like hearts. A LOT, so I had to dig deep to find some restraint once I purchased this heart die and say 'don't go buy anything else heart related'.
I enjoyed using my nestabilties, although I was pretty much convinced when removing them from their packaging that I was going to bend them. I knew they were thin, but apparently my understanding of the word thin is inadequate. Wafer thin! I need to give them a more reasonable home though right now they live in an old photo sleeve I had.

I got a little carried away with the butterflies on this one. And the texture. I like it anyway though! In addition to really liking hearts I really like butterflies. And unicorns and puppies and kitties and and and....

Ok card:

More hearts! Yay hearts! I purchased a bunch of papers from the American Crafts 'Romance' line a while back, this was the first time I had a chance to use any of it though. I like the line a lot and think I will end up using most of it on cards.

Finally, I was able to work on those thank you cards from the doggie. I decided I wanted to make it a simple single layer card. I don't have any thought bubble stamps, so what I did was trace around one of my scalloped oval nestabilities. It's not perfect, but way better than I would have been able to do free-hand!

I decided to color the stamped image with a sharpie ultra fine point marker instead of my pencils. I must say, I love the results! I may have to get a few more markers. Sharpie: the poor woman's Copic!