20+ Card Making Tips & Tricks - A 2024 COMPILATION!

so rather than trying to glue all of this with um a nozzle that's maybe too large I'm going to instead apply my glue with a brayer so onto a resistant mat something that's going to protect my Surface I'm going to apply a little bit of wet glue this is a glue that I would use for sticking D cuts down and I'm going to take a braer and just roll that into the glue so it's a nice thin layer then I'm going to Bray this all over the reverse of the die cut I can now go ahead and apply that to my project wherever I want it and as you can see everything is stuck down so this card has been stuck down with a double-sided tape and this card has got layers stuck down with foam pads or foam tape it's all very similar and I'm going to release both of these now these cards were actually made months ago so in theory they should be well stuck by now and not coming off but I'm simply going to use a heat tool obviously be aware if you've got any heat embossing on your card or your project that you could remelt that embossing while doing this technique so I'm simply going to start off with my heat gun behind my card on the reverse from where the adhesive is this way I'm not heating the front of my card and causing any damage to the inking and the embossing that's on here and as you can see already this is starting to peel away once one corner has started to lift you can just tease that then you can take your heat gun and you can put it underneath and now my card base is separated from the front so this could be for multiple reasons but either way you can then rtick this or throw it and reuse your card base and exactly the same applies when you're doing this with a foam tape too so again heating from the reverse I'm just going to warm this up until I see that start to lift and I can get the heat gun underneath there a little bit more as you can see there's no residue left on the car stop either so it's all about your hot glue gun now how many people are scared of using a hot glue gun because of course you can bur your fingers you know it can leave the glue strings it's not always perfect so what I tend to do is take my hot glue gun heat it up get myself a silicon matte and I just pop myself some glue drops on my mat so I do this about once a month and I just get myself maybe 20 or 30 glue drops it takes me just a few minutes and then I pop them aside to dry once the glue drops have cooled down you can just pop them off the Silicon mat and store them away now I tend to come to these when I need just the tiniest little drop of glue I don't need to worry about waiting for my glue gun to heat up plus it's a lot safer and a lot easier all you need to do is take the appropriate size glue dot because of course you can make these small and large pop it where you'd like to use a glue drop so this is usually for my heavier and uh different material embellishments like this wooden star and rather than using my wet hot glue and putting the star directly in it while it's still warm and rushing I can be careful to position that exactly where I want it and then gently just warm it with my heat gun which of course is instant heat and as soon as that's Gone transparent I can put my embellishment into it now I have got absolutely no glue strings and that is instantly adhere about foiling without a foiling machine this is the Magnolia half tone stamp and die set I love it but I'd love the look of it foiled so I've cut it out and I'm going to put it onto a dark card stock so you can really see but you may be thinking well that's not really a tip that's just gluing a foiled piece of card stock onto another piece because that wasn't the tip this is how to make it look like foiling now you'll notice that with the glued on die cut we've got this raised area so it looks like it's glued on now with real oiling that would be completely smooth to the surface of the card stock and that's what we're going to do so we're going to bring in our die cutting machine and I'm going to place a rubber mat onto the base plate of my machine this is a thin rubber mat so it's one that is going to go through in the die cutting sandwich without having to take any other plates out then I'm going to place my piece of foiled card stock or not yet almost foiled onto the die cutting plat there onto the rubber mat with the design facing upwards put my top plate on and run this through there's no dye in here so what this is doing is adding pressure to the design and it's pressing that mirror card design the die cut into the card stock and flattening it out so now we've got something that looks more like foiling now all dyes you can usually emboss with if they are the D where you have to snip elements out of each other they're not as easy until you've done the Snipping but nesting dyes are perfect now you can use any shape or size of nesting dye and any amount of them that you want just lay down a rubber mat in your plates or your sandwich put your card stock down then your nesting dieses with the dyes facing downwards and then your plate on top and you have got subtle texture that you can use in the background of the card or just a subtly frame something on your card so this is the result of cutting this dye in the normal way through my d cutting machine the card stock is around about 220 GSM so it should be perfect for die cutting um some of the elements I can probably pop away but certainly in the middle here there's absolutely nothing cut through whatsoever I haven't put any shims with this I've not gone through multiple times or anything like that because I want to see if this hack makes a difference and it's actually a really easy one I don't know how it would work if it's going to but somebody said to use bubble wrap so in the spirit of keeping everything fair I have got the other half of this card stock so I'm using the same card stock to run through the same Dy as well I'm going to open this up now I cut this one with my D facing up and this is actually one of my tips for you anyway so putting the dye on the plate first then the card stock on top like so now from what I understand this tip says to then put your bubble wrap or Jiffy bag over the top of that so it's almost cutting into the um Jiffy bag as well so let's first of all see well I think it's actually it has wow I mean there's there's a little bit here that's still not quite cut through just there and the same just here but that has made a huge difference so I put this in the machine the same way and the same cards look as this one so I've just D cut this butterfly and I'm going to use this waist here to stencil the color that I want through you can of course use your coloring pencils your alcohol pens whatever it is you prefer to color with but we're just using this as a silhouette to brush some ink through and we have now got the perfect colored outline for our D cut to sit over the top of how beautiful is that so so when you've die cut something that's really intricate you know you're going to pull that D cut out and you're going to have all the little bits that you've got to use your Pokey tool with to pop out and it's going to take you forever use this quick trick to make sure that as many of the pieces stay inside the dye because it's so much easier to clean the dye than the paper D cut so once I've put my Pokey tool through one of the release holes and just released a corner I tend to very gently take this out and bend it backwards Okay so I'm not going to just pull the whole thing um really quickly I'm going to bend it backwards on on itself you see that so what this does is leaves as much of the paper of the Little D cut inside the D now not everything's going to stay in the D but many of the pieces will as you can see there this just means if you are creating a project it is so much quicker for you to then clean up your D later and this is almost perfect there's a couple of little bits that I need to clean out but that is going to take me so much less time now as for actually cleaning my dye a brush like this is perfect even an old toothbrush if you have it and what I tend to do is slightly bend my dye so I'll place it down lift up the edge with my thumb in the middle so I'm giving it a slight curve not enough to bend it permanently at all a slight curve and then I brush over and as you can see all the pieces come out so so quick and easily that is by far the quickest way for you to clean the pieces out of your dyes and your D Cuts your layering D Cuts now when you layer your D Cuts together you're going to get absolutely beautiful results but how can you improve this even more it's very very simple all you need to do is take a little bit of time and effort to cut two layers of each of the dyes look at this I mean this is one layer this is two layers you can see the thickness of the die Cuts there the depth and the contrast that you've got by just adding an extra couple of layers into this one is so worth the effort it looks so much more dimensional and that is really going to stand up much more on your project guys when you are putting these layers together it's really important that you do not use pattern paper for all of your layers I wouldn't personally even use it for one of your layers particularly if it's an intricate design but I'll show you that with this particular butterfly Dy what happens when you start to layer up this one does doesn't look tooo bad although you can you're sort of missing the actual design of the die cut because the dark and the light areas of the paper is just sort of hiding where the shape is and then this one even more intricate when it's placed on top look you just lose everything to be honest if I'm going to use any pattern paper with a die cut like this any sort of intricate die cut in fact this is as as detailed a pattern paper as I would go then I'm going to use solid card stock so putting that over the top you can really clearly see the defined borders and then this one over the top as well again you can see every element there look at the difference between the two how much more does that stand out you know when sometimes it's an intricate die and you miss a little bit from the middle and you need to really carefully kind of position that back into the die and you know it's going to move when you run it back through again to cut it fully this is going to help you so make sure you've kept the waist so what I'm going to do is position my D cut back into the waist there and it should all slot in really nicely take yourself a piece of low tax tape just across the back there hold it in place then we can put our dye on top now if you give this a wiggle that should then slot back in place where it needs to be nothing's going to move so you can go ahead and die cut this you can put your metal shims in you can turn it if you want to and get the perfect cut without accidentally cutting any of the Little ends off ideally want to place your dyes so that the roller is only going over one or two dyes at a time but this isn't always possible because of the size of the dyes so when we do this instead I'm going to just stagger these dyes and I'm going to try to make sure as much as possible and it doesn't matter if a little bit of the waist card stock is overlapping the die cutting plate I'm going to make sure as much as possible that the r roller is only touching one part of the dye at any time so these stamman rather than putting them all together this way I'm going to turn them so that the roller is concentrating on one at a time just check the reverse of your die cuts too because if you see any ghosting then you need to run that particular die through again and this is what is really important to tape your dyes down now another tip for you is when a stamp is brand new as mine is here I like to prepare it and I like to do that by taking the coating off that on the stamp through the manufacturing process now you only need to do this once and the easiest and really the least expensive way of doing this is simply by using a pencil eraser I've got one of these ones that are quite large and are flat and I just rub the flat surface over the design just back and forth as if I'm trying to erase pencil marks from it and do it gently and then make sure you brush away any of the residue that's come away from the Eraser that is going to leave you with more of a matte surface you'll be able to fill that straight away then I like to go in with a clear ink before I put my colored ink on top so something like an embossing ink just tapping a little over the surface this is also going to help your ink to stick to your stamp and then I go in straight away with my black ink or whatever color ink you want to use now I'm not pressing into the stamp if I was pressing into the stamp I'd be squishing ink into all the detail where I don't actually want it see there I've got a perfectly detailed and clear image I'm going to show you how you can easily blend your inks onto your stamp so that you're getting multicolored stamping in just one impression now usually of course we would take our ink pad directly to our stamp and you can do that but you're going to get first of all harsh straight lines where the edges of the ink pad are but you're also not going to be accurate where you're applying color to small areas so I might go in with a few places with my pink just like so just to get some base color down but then I'm going to go in with my brush and I'm going to take that color up to the edge of each petal in a dabbing motion and at the same time as I'm doing this I'm also then blending out those strong straight lines that I've just placed down and I'm going to go in with my green now and I'm not going to be putting this direct to my stamp because the areas are much too small I'm looking at this Leaf here and a few leaves around here and then the stems for each of the florals now I'm also using water reactive inks and this means that I can now Mist My Ink with a little bit of water not much at all and this is going to also help the blending when stamping so just pressing this down now into my card stock and now I've got my beautiful ombre image and as you can see with this stamped image of the same we've just added the outline and the coloring is absolutely perfect now I absolutely love to use black card stock Navy card stock burgundy card stock but then I find stamping onto it can be particularly difficult if I don't have some really good pigment inks so looking at the dye inks that I have chosen when I put them onto the Navy card stock that I'm going to use as you can see really can't see the color at all it just soaks in and that is not going to stand out as a beautiful stamped image so we're going to really enhance these by doing another step first so now going to take a piece of resistant material and this is just a piece of acetate and I've got some white paint now the brand is irrelevant it's white acrylic paint so it's thicker than watercolor it's not going to soak into your paper it's going to sit on top leaving you a lovely opaque color so white or certainly as light as you can find and a few drops on my mat now I'm going to take a small Brer I prefer to work with a smaller Brer than a larger one it's a little more precise I get less on the rest of my my stamping platform as well and I'm just going to take a little bit of that paint and then away from that blob I'm going to smear that so that it's a really thin coating on my braer and bring this over to my stamp and start rolling it on the reason I'm using a Brer is because it's a flat surface so I'm not going to get any excess paint down into the parts of the stamp where I don't want it and then I'm going to press that into my blue card stock and make sure that I'm getting a really good impression with this so lift that away and now we need to make sure that everything has stamped now this particular stamp does always look odd when it's just stamped in one color because we have got the half tone effect here so there's some areas that are missing I'm going to now first of all give this a quick wipe to take the excess off then I'm going to thoroughly soak the stamp in water and leave that to sit for a moment this is going to water down any paint that's in the grooves and the bumps of the stamp itself so I'm going to reposition my stamp it's very very easy for you to see exactly where you're stamping so now to apply My Ink I'm going to go with a distress ink peacock feathers and then I'm going to take peeled paint which is a green and I'm going to take a stencil brush and I'm going to dab this green over where the stems are and where any of the leaves are once you've covered that you can first of all try stamping just as it is and then if you find that color isn't quite enough watery enough or deep enough you can then Spritz a very light mist of water if you need and try again but looking through this I think this is going to be quite good so we can see there how much Bolder that color really is so that's just one layer of the color and if we compare that to the inks that I swatched before you can see how much brighter that is now to Simply add over the top the die cut from the set and there you can really see how well those highlights and those Shadows work on that stamp and how beautiful and bright the color is coming through last one now there are lots of beautiful embossing folders on the market but maybe you've been gifted some you don't have a die cutting machine or perhaps you absolutely love yours but you don't want to get your die cutting machine out and you just want to emboss a tiny little bit well there are ways around this so I'm going to show you the first one and that's to just simply use pressure with something like a rolling pin so I'm going to place some card stock or paper ideally you want to go for a lightweight paper because if it's card stock you're going to need more pressure which without a machine you're going to struggle to do I'm going to use a rolling pin from the kitchen and I'm just going to press over this like I say a lightweight paper is ideal so let's see if we can see the emboss so obviously the emboss is going to be lighter it's not going to be as deep unless you're super strong of course but this is still able to then be in you can use your spritzes on it and you can really show up the detail still now another way to use your embossing folders that doesn't take much pressure at all is to Simply ink them I'd always suggest inking both sides of the folder so I'm going to take a waterbased ink and just smear it over the side where you can see the detail and then again the side that highlights the background of your image so just placing my paper inside there carefully and pressing down now you're not going to get the image that you can see here but you are going to get another beautiful image I'll show you in just a second but I'm just using my fingers to squeeze between the two now just so you know this is not really going to work with 3D embossing folders there's so many layers your inks only ever going to touch the very top one of those unless you really apply lots of ink into the grooves and then of course lots of pressure which is what we're saying we don't have so squeezing around all the detail and then reveal so on one side we have this beautiful image that's the background inking and on the other side we have similar but not quite the same as you can see the background is perfectly clear and we've really picked out the detail stenciling colors onto dark colors so sometimes you may find that your ink blending through a stencil onto a dark color isn't as vibrant as you expect it to be even if you've used a pigment ink so to make the stencil really stand out what we're going to do is apply a white layer first and then put our Colors Over the Top I'm going to do this with texture paste but I'd always recommend first of all you Spritz the back of your stencil with something like a repositionable spray or a stencil glue once your stencil is firmly secured down you can apply a texture paste now I would go for a smooth paste not one with a grit and one that is opaque white not a transparent one or even another colored one definitely white is the best color for you to then show up your inks afterwards nice and bright and bold you want to place your stencil back over the top of the design once it's completely dry and now you can do your ink blending now you can layer your inks you can mix them and you can use the white underneath to create highlights and as you can see we've got beautiful bold color on top of the black card stock there we have gone and ink Blended a background or a panel then we've stamped on it with our clearing embossing ink put the powder on and the powder has stuck everywhere so I'm going to show you how to avoid that but most importantly if you do do it because you just don't expect the ink to take quite so long to dry how to fix it so first of all prevention is always going to be better than cure so once you've ink Blended your panel you may have used your heat gun on it to warm it up and hopefully fully dry it take an embossing powder now take one that's going to be nice and contrasting against your background and spread it all over the area that you're going to place it when you come to do your embossing now once that's fully dry and you can tap this off easily then you know that you can go ahead and do your stamping and of course then do your heat embossing without any little specks flying anywhere but sometimes we just don't think ahead so what do you do if it's too late you've stamped your image and then put your embossing on all I'm going to do is set this aside I'm going to come back to that in about 10 minutes tap the back and see if any more powder comes off okay so let's give this a bit more of Click there Perfect all I've done is allowed that ink to dry I'd like to talk to you today about your die cutting plates warping so this happens on most die cutting machines but I have got a few tips to help you prevent it so my first tip is to ensure you are using the correct plate combination for the correct pressure because I'm going to show you now an example of what happens when you use incorrect pressure now we all know it is occasionally going to happen particularly if you've had a difficult die and you have had to add additional pressure for some reason so my tip here is to each time you run your plates through turn your top plate over so that if you do have any curve it's then facing down into the machine and into the plates and you can do this each and every time you run your plates through perfect now we're only going to be using two products for this on top of our card stock NOW the more cracks you want the bigger you want your cracks the thicker you're going to want your glue spread out so I've really put quite a lot on here more so you can really see the effect now this is the uh bit that I don't enjoy so much and it's simply waiting for this to dry now that has just started to dry enough so that when I apply my paint it's not all going to lift up you are going to get some movement in the paint underneath unless you've left let it thoroughly dry now if you let it thoroughly dry you will still get a crackle effect but I find the better effect is if you still leave it so it's tacky so that the UN maybe there's a slight skin on it but the underneath is still wet now I'm going to go in with my acrylic paint I've made sure I've shaken this so that it's all mixed up and I don't get that watery glute coming out first you want to be aware of your brush Strokes as well because those brush Strokes are really going to be emphasized once we start drying this paint so just putting my phone on here and leaving it for a few minutes filming it I've obviously sped this up for you and then I started going in with my heat gun and very lightly from a distance just warming the air around the paint to make everything start to dry and crackle you can see those large cracks already starting to come into place now you can see the difference there thicker layer and a thinner layer in reality the thickness of those layers wasn't hugely different so definitely have a play and get a feel for the type the style of crackles that you enjoy using