Technique Tuesday #4 - Negative Die Cuts

Hello!

Dashing in with a Technique Tuesday and this one is super simple and something I've had a brief play with before.

Negative Die Cuts.

Now last week I mentioned getting more use out of your dies by using them to deboss, this is another way to really get more value from your dies. Not every die you have will work for this, you'll want something that has a reasonable amount of detail in the outline, but isn't too detailed on the inside as all that will just be lost. However, some detailed or filigree dies can also work well as negative die cuts even though you lose the interior detail, because they have a good shape anyway.

Basically you will want something with a clear outline where it's obvious from the outline what it is.

For this example I used a Christmas tree. Other good dies for Christmas cards like this might include snowflakes, stars, baubles, crackers, deer etc.

I used an old Magnolia die as this is actually the only Christmas tree die I own, hmm I guess I should correct that soon. But anyway it worked very well for this.  This was actually a super quick and easy card to put together. Normally I would have embossed the stars and sentiment, but I could not find my gold embossing powder, (a hint to tidy my craft space perhaps?), so I just went with some lovely metallic gold ink instead.

The paper is from a Lemoncraft Christmas pad but almost any seasonal, (and many non seasonal), patterned paper would work well with this I think.

The sentiment is from the Mama Elephant Jingle Greetings set, the ribbon is from The Ribbon Girl and the small chipboard stars are from Make it Crafty

I hand cut the panel of white card, but would probably use a stitched rectangle die next time.

This would be a great card for quickly batch producing for your Christmas needs, you can change up the papers, ribbon and sentiment to make them a little different.

That's all from me today, but I have a fair few Christmas cards to share before the 25th so I'll be back with you soon.