My Ultimate Sweater Machine Diary

If you missed a recent post, I bought a Bond American Ultimate Sweater Machine! It's a 100 needle flat knitting machine and it's actually a little tricky to master. I explain how and why in my first video diary.

3 Easy Ways to Cut Tissue Paper for Crafts

Every now and then I enjoy making a craft video. I am by no means a pro at it, but each one gets a little better every time. There are so many factors such as audio, lighting, camera positioning and complaining cockatiels :-D

I finally made a title card after noticing that some craft videos have some pretty snazzy introductions. I made a black & white drawing, cleaned it up in Corel Photo Paint and then converted it to a vector image in CorelDraw so the colours could be changed easily.

Inspiration came from a video that suggested putting the camera tripod on top of the desk. It's hard to craft with a tripod between you and your hands, so this worked well, except the video is upside down and rotating it can look funny. Time to do things the left handed way until I get a fancier set up :-D

I'm pleased to show off this technique for cutting tissue paper. I figured it out back in spring when making a card for my friend Always Artistic and taking photos just didn't seem to do. Take a look and let me know if this is a technique that you would like to try as well!

Come learn with me!

I'm excited to announce that I will be teaching a class on February 28 at Loft 112. Come and learn the magic of scherenschnitte or papercutting! If you can pronounce it, you can do it :-D All materials are provided.

Happy Halloween!

Here in the Bennett household we are always looking for new things and new ways of doing things. Last year for Halloween I bought loads of fun toys and stickers for the young ghouls and goblins. Surely the wee ones appreciate Play-Doh over Dubble Bubble and I hate spending money on cheaper than usual candy, and I like to be sensitive to kids that might have a food allergy or diabetes. I almost had this idea too late - making my mini pony colouring book even more mini! It was simple to scale down the artwork, cut up, make covers from card stock and staple together! I squeezed 8 pictures on to one letter sized page, but could have scaled them down to quarter fold size too. Have a fun and safe Halloween peeps!

My Fun New Custom Sizzix Die!

Today I have a very exciting blog post. It's the story of how I ordered my own die from Ellison, probably better known to crafters as Sizzix, makers of the Big Shot die cutting machine. Some of you know I used to make a lot of artists trading cards. But I always got hung up on being precise about the measurements and cutting all the cards from different materials. Thought was killing action! So, I thought, I'll just find a die and crank out tons of cards.

Well, it turns out that it's very hard to find a die with the right dimensions. If it exists, my Google-fu is severely broken. I could find rectangle dies for sure, but none were the same dimensions as an artist trading card. The closest I came up with was 2.25 x 3.25". The size of rectangles seemed pretty arbitrary. So I just happened to be on the Sizzix website and saw a Thanksgiving sale on custom dies. I sent off an email and found out that they only made custom block style and not wafer thin dies. Not a problem though! I put the order through, approved a proof and a few weeks later, my die arrived through FedEx.

I couldn't wait to try it out and got a piece of scrap paper. It cut a perfect crisp Artist Trading Card. Look at all the cards I cut from old brochures, paper scraps and maps. It made dozens of dies in minutes.

It's true that I have a digital die cutter, but it uses sticky mats, and delicate materials like thin paper and fabric wouldn't work very well. I really enjoyed the friendly and prompt service from the Ellison rep, and yes, they ship to Canada. It was wrapped in a bubble mailer inside another bubble mailer. I promised the rep that my next order would be far more exciting than a plain rectangle.
Probably something with a horse or a bird, you know me!

Now I just have to get into action and make some completed ATCs and ACEOs :-) Stay tuned!

Lucky Loot

It's been a while since I blogged about the fabulous British papercraft magazines that I load up on every time I visit Chapters. The loot that a whole bunch of Christmas issues came with was crazy! Even more impressive was that the Christmas issues were on shelves before Christmas. One issue of Papercraft Inspirations came with a wafer thin metal die. Super cool, but the little pieces do get stuck in the die pretty easily.

The goodies below are from Crafts Beautiful are hilariously awesome. I'm ready to try paper quilling with the strips, tool and shape board. PaperCrafter one upped them with a giant card making kit that included fold up birdhouses and bling. The magazines are always a little pricier, but I think it's well worth it, especially if I didn't want to invest too much in a new technique beforehand.