Articles : Tutorials - Paper Crafting

Let's get PUNCHY

easy and quick to use~~and they and they look great

Punches, something that I as a beginner scrapbooker, years ago bought a ton of. After awhile they started collecting dust as I started seeing new cool things to play with. UNTIL, my son started playing with them and making cool things. I thought, wow, I can still use these. And with some of the newer ones out, it is even funner and quicker than ever before. I realize you can make cool new shapes with the amazing die cut machines they have out now, but if you want something quick, easy and portable, then a punch just might be for you.

Below are some of the ones I will be highlighting.

Circle X-Large punchHeart X-Large Punch

2 inch scallop nesting punch

 Using punches is a great way to do a page fast. This page took me less than five minutes and the longest part of that was digging through my stash for the alphabets. LOL

I also used the large circle punch from the back to school page to make this quick baseball that I am going to use on Cole's T-ball page.

These EXTRA BIG punches are WOW. Look at how you can make your own background....quick and easy.

You can also take your punches and make them into something other than what you think they might be used for. Here I have made a flower from a heart punch. I have also done this with a medium sized circle punch. FUN!  Another thing I love doing is putting titles or journaling on the punched shapes. Like in this puppy love layout.

and I used my large square punch to place the title on this page. Punch, ink, letter, voila cool title effect!

 Sometimes, I have found myself in LOVE with a patterned paper, but it is so busy that I have a hard time trying to decide what to do with it. Voila, dig for those punches. Below, I loved the starburst background paper but cutting it up just did not work, so instead I used it as my main point and cut out coordinating papers. The outcome was I got to use the whole sheet of the pp wihtout it being to busy to distract from the photo.

Here is another example. I had a GORGEOUS pic, that I did not want the papers to distract from, but the papers were perfect for the photo. In this case, I used the milder paper for the background and used the patterned paper to punch the hearts out from.

looking to  add quick and easy accents to a page, grab that punch!

On this one, I had the whole layout done, but something just seemed to be missing. Went and grabbed that snowflake punch from my son and accented the diamond paper and that added just what I needed. A little maroon to offset the maroon in the rest of the page.  

Don't even remember my reasoning behind this one, LOL but I just love the effect of the circles along the side of the larger picture.

The newest (or oldest depending on how long you have been scrapping since they are making a re-emergence) is the border punch. The Treading Water punch by Fiskars is worth every penny. It is such a fun and unique way to add dimension to your pages. In the layout below instead of using it on the paper I used it on the photo.

Sometimes you want only certain parts of a patterned paper. This paper is absolutely ADORABLE, but I did not want it to take over from the picture of Cole's and MY first time sledding. So I used the scallop punch to use the patterned paper as an accent.

Published on 08/23/2008.