A FEW TIPS

I have a couple of good tips for you in this post. At least, I think you'll find them to be good tips, unless you've already discovered these things by yourself.

I love cards that look like paper quilts. Although this card isn't a traditional quilt pattern, this is the kind of quilts I've made in the past. Just equal sized squares of fabric. A patchwork quilt? 

For my card, I decided to alternate the squares with Blackberry Bliss cardstock and Designer Series Paper. I wanted each of the squares to be 1". I've done the 1" squares thing in the past, using my paper cutter. No matter how careful I was in my cutting, they were always -- ALWAYS -- a sliver off. Frustrating indeed. To alleviate this situation, I smartly used my 1" square punch. Every once in a while the brain kicks in.

My card is 20 squares, four across and five down. I've seen cards similar to this one where the creator used partial squares to accommodate the 4 1/4" x 5 1/2" card. Huh. Not necessary. Simply use a 4" x 5" piece of white cardstock as your base. This way your "quilt" goes edge to edge with full squares all around. You then mount it onto a base that measures 4 1/4" x 5 1/4". So it's a quarter inch shorter than a traditional card. It still fits perfectly inside an A2 envelope.

For my card, after I had the quilting done, I wanted it to look even more quilt-like. So I opted to emboss the layer. Because I had used DSP that had gorgeous skeleton leaves all over it, I found an embossing folder that had leaves in it. I thought that would be ideal.

After running the layer through the Big Shot inside the leafy embossing folder, I was somewhat disappointed. The leaves were much too sporadic for my liking. What now? I had just "ruined" my paper quilt.

But wait! No, I didn't!! I simply put it back into the embossing folder again, but this time I turned it upside down. Not sure that this would work, I was nervous about seeing the results of this double dose of embossing.

To my delight, it turned out very nicely. And this time some of the embossing was on every single one of the squares.

OK, so maybe that ended up being three little tips: Use a 1" square punch to make all your quilt squares the exact same size; use a 4" x 5" piece of white cardstock as the base for your quilt, enabling each and every square to fit on perfectly, then mounted onto a 4 1/4" x 5 1/4" card base; and finally the tip for double embossing. Cool stuff, huh? I just LOVE happy accidents, like the double embossing. I'd never tried that before.

Tippy

Smiles.