Gorjuss Gate

The time has come again... yes it's cute time as I had to make a birthday card for a young girl. Still, this is an opportunity to use this stamp, bought on a whim, and pull out my alcohol markers.

Do you remember when the Martha Stewart  PATP  punches were all the rage? Nowadays die-cutting is more likely to feature in projects, but I wanted to get some use out my punches and was looking for something different. I wanted my borders to face inwards rather than outwards and came up with a process to achieve the effect without cutting the borders first and assembling into a square (knowing myself, there is no way I could have mitred the corners perfectly!)

I eliminated the measuring by choosing a 6"x6" square patterned paper, and marked the diagonals in pencil. I placed a square die (the 6th largest in the Spellbinders large square set) so the 4 corners intersected with the diagonals drawn. That way it is perfectly centred.
Once the square is cut out, there is an opening through which the border punch can be inserted.

By eye, using the notches on the punch as guidelines, I centred the punch and punched once. I needed to punch one more motif to the left and to the right of that first punched area, so I did that with the punch upside down. This is repeated for the 3 other sides.

Then I used the corner punch (with the wings folded), upside down again to align with the corner of the square aperture. The highest portion of the punch design is lost, but I didn't mind since it looked different but OK. Finally, I used scissors to snip where border and corner punches have overlapped.

I haven't tested this with another design but looking forward to find out...

To embellish the card, I used a tree die (Memory Box), a label die (Impression Obsession) and flower and leaf dies (Papertrey Ink).

I decided to use the spare 6"x6" piece of paper to stiffen and balance the back :



I have taken inspiration  from these challenges:

Artful Times - Die-cut or punches
Crafts-Too - The Natural World/Add a flower twist. The nature bit is not so much the tree, flower etc.. but the swing, these days youngsters are much more likely to be playing with electric gizmos!
Pan Pastel UK - All about Paper/Card
Stamping Sensations - Free and Easy


Thanks for coming by,