A few weeks ago, I was surfing the web, and came across a site that sells punches, McGill Inc. This site has a wealth of information on how to make flowers with their punches, and even some projects to use the flowers on. I love flowers, but I can't seem to grow any in my yard, so I have decided to surround myself with paper flowers... at least those won't die on me. LOL
As I was looking through all the projects, I found one that I thought would be fun to make for the ladies at my next card club meeting. Pot O' Crocus They just looked so cute, and I thought the Crocus would be easy to make. So the only thing I needed was some small pails or flower pots to put them in.
Last week, my BF and I went to go see IronMan 3 at the IMAX, but we got there to late to get good seat for the show we wanted, so we bought our tickets for the next show and headed across the street to Michaels to wander around and kill time until the show started. They were having a sale on all their Ashland Signature collection garden things, and I found some cute pails at 60% off that I thought would be perfect for my Crocus project. Here are 4 of them, I got 2 of each color.
They are about 3 inches high so just the right size. I wasn't crazy about the papers on them, but thought for the price, I could cover them with something else and kind of tone down the bright colors.
I started working on the flowers a few days later, I don't own many punches, and I don't want to start collecting them, because I like to use my Silver Bullet die cutting machine that I purchased from Sherri at ThatsScrapInc. The punch they use for the Crocus is a pear shape. Well, I looked through all my files, and found something that I thought would work, and resized it to make the small flowers. What I forgot to do, is alter the file to remove the stem, BEFORE I cut them out... LOL So I sat at my table with my scissors cutting the small stem off all my pears... next time I'm going to remember to alter the file to just the pear shape before I cut out enough pieces to make 18 flowers.
I haven't had a lot of time to work on my flowers with the crazy hours at work, but I did manage to get 3 done so far...this isn't the best picture of them, but it gives you an idea of what they look like.
On Sunday, I wanted to work on creating something to cover the pails. I use both Make The Cut (MTC) and Sure Cuts a Lot (SCAL) software with my Silver Bullet, as they each have their strengths. MTC has a conical wrap feature that lets you create a design and cut it out so it fits around something that doesn't have the same dimensions at the top and bottom, like a tumbler or my pails. But I didn't want to just cut out a design to apply to my pails, I wanted to cut out a piece of paper to wrap around the pails and hide what is already on there. I also wanted to start using some of the digital papers I have been collecting, and thought this would be a great project to try both the conical wrap and the texture features in MTC. Using the conical wrap is easy enough, you just measure your diameter at the top and bottom of your item, and the distance from the top to the bottom and put your numbers in the box on MTC. It will then show you what your design will look like on your item. Since I wanted a piece of paper to wrap all the way around my pail, I started with a rectangle. My problem came when trying to figure out what size to make the rectangle so there wasn't a huge overlap at the ends, but enough of one so there wouldn't be any gap at my seam. I played around with it for a good part of the day, trying to figure it out on my own, then finally gave up and asked a question on the MTC forum. As is usually the case, there was someone with an answer to my question with in minutes of me posting. And it was so simple I should have seen it myself. In the conical wrap window, it shows the measurement of the top middle and bottom of your wrap. I took the middle measurement, added a 1/4 inch, for the overlap, and made my rectangle that long by the height of my pail. I cut out a test sheet, and it fit PERFECTLY!!!!! (Thanks HappyCrafter for showing me the light!!!)
The next obstacle was adding my digital paper to my shape. I was going to use PnC but the size of my wrap wouldn't allow for the registration marks to be printed, so I couldn't line up my cut. So the way I worked around this problem, was to create a rectangle that was slightly larger than my wrap, fill that with my digital paper, and then print the rectangle, line up the blade on my Silver Bullet,with the corner of the rectangle and just cut out my shape. Doing it this way, allowed me to not have to print a full page of the texture, saving on ink (in my case saving toner, since I use a color laser printer), but giving me enough room to make sure I had my shape fully within the texture.
I haven't finished my project yet, but when I get them all done, I will be posting more pictures with all my pails full of crocus. I try to make a flower or two a night... but it depends on what time I get home from work if I have time to work on them or not. However, I do need to get them done before June.. so I need to get busy... LOL
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