B Yourself

Set the Black Cat to the task of doing the cutting on multiples of a Paula Best rubber stamp, the "B Yourself Mannequin". I scanned a print of the stamp at 100% and traced the outer edge, cut multiples in cardstock, and then hand stamped using a stamp positioner. It was a little off in places, requiring a tiny bit of trimming, but not much. 

There's probably a better way to do this, but I haven't investigated yet.

It's hard to see in the pictures, but I cut three images for each tag to paper-piece

them together: basically the bottom is the whole stamp, the middle is the

mannequin minus stand and wings, and the top is the head and rabbit.

So that's a lot of mannequin that I didn't have to cut out by hand.
That is an excellent thing.

I tweaked a basic tag shape in the MTC program, and cut tags from Donna Estabrooks'

"the Colorful Life" 8x8 cardstock pack, and then cut a shadow layer in black.

On some of the tags, I used the
Tim Holtz Pickett Fence Distress Stain to tone the colors down.

The "B Yourself" figures were partially colored first with various Distress Stain 

colors and then over-colored with Copic markers. Some of them got a final distressing

with the Picket Fence stain. Added ribbon and a little key charm to finish.

These three also got a "believe" stamp, embossed in white detail EP.

I also used the cutter to design and cut an envelope for the tags, which were then embossed with the cuttlebug and finished with a tiny 3D letter "B" sticker. Some of the mannequins got brown faces, for all of us Mocha Divas (saw that on the TLo blog commentary recently, and it tickled me), and the rest are bit more fantasy face.

Something Old, Something New

The new labels!

Rock, Paper, Vinyl

In a previous post, I mentioned using the new digital cutter to make new labels

for the card catalog that holds a lot of my crafting supplies and rubber stamps.

And I rather blithely mentioned that paper didn't work so well. 

May I present Exhibit A: Paper Not Working So Well

Then I remembered the little sample of cut vinyl that came with the cutter as a test cut.

I'd never cut vinyl on the Craft Robo, so it hadn't occurred to me until now to use it. 

So I dug out a roll of vinyl that I'd bought a long time ago and never used, and it worked really well. The experiments I'd tried with transferring and gluing paper were marginal at best, and the vinyl has an adhesive on the back already. "Weeded" (vinyl sign talk for getting rid of the little bits inside the shape with an x-acto or other tool) it and lifted the letters off the backing with transfer tape . . .

and then transferred it from there to a piece of transparency paper.

That was rather fun. 

A lot more fun than scraping tiny letters off a mat.