8 Creative Ways to Use Nesting Dies 💡 Unlock the Full Potential of Your Crafting Tools!

hi everybody lots of you have probably got nesting dyes at home that you've bought but do you use them as much as you should I'm going to show you in this video multiple different ways to use your nesting D for fun card shapes and mechanisms and probably ways that you haven't thought of before so the main reason I purchase lots of nesting dieses in different shapes is to create shaped card bases with them and I can do these in any size working from the largest nesting D down to the smallest but then I've also got all of my mats and layers available in dieses as well so to show you how I do this with an unusual shape is I just tack down a d over a card base so there there's a card base just a rectangle one this is a pre-made one I've got a beautiful shaped Dy here that I'd like to make into a card shape so I'm just going to overlap the die a little bit over the edge of the card that's the scored Edge there and I'm going to run this through my die cutting machine the creative craft products dyes are such good quality they will easily go through two layers of card stock at once now I've got a bit of a shape there and I could use that if I want to complete that shape again I just simply take myself another piece of white card stock and cut the entire shape from it and by adhering this complete shape over my cup card base I've then got myself a DIY shaped card base that I can use horizontally or vertically depending on the shape there we go that fits over perfectly how neat and tidy is that so then my mats and layers I just simply take the next smallest D down I cut myself something like a colored or patterned paper from this one and there's my first mat and I can keep working my way down the sizes for as many mates and layers as I need and the beauty of of course using nesting dyes is that all the proportions are already worked out for you if you were to try to cut these by hand you'd probably never get it quite right as well as mates and layers you can also cut things like frames so I've just cut this pattern paper as you saw with the middle siiz die if I take the next smallest one down I can place this just inside or I could take the one down from that if I wanted to tape it down onto my card stock run that through my machine and now I've got a beautifully shaped and perfectly sized frame for my card as well then another brilliant way of using your nesting dyes if you've created the card shape using a larger D use one of the smaller ones to create the matching aperture to go inside that card of course you don't have to have shaped the card originally you can just have yourself some fun shape apures otherwise and of course circles and squares and rectangles are all absolutely perfect for this all the time so I'm just going to place one of my smaller dyes inside the uh frame that we've already created on the shaped card I'm going to open this up and I'm going to cut through that front panel and now I've got a shaped card I've got mates and layers that will fit in there I've got an aperture and I've got a frame all from one set of nesting dyes you can also use nesting d to actually create the embellishment or the focal point on your card rather than shaping the card so here's a few examples for you so for this one I've simply die cut some circles on a panel of pattern card stock and flipped over the half that I die cut a really quick contempory card for this one here I've used some hexagon nesting dyes and I've cut out lots of different shapes onto one panel of card stock and then pieced it all back together leaving out some of the areas so that some color can pop through that's really easy to do as well just here I've used again some hexagons and just cut them from different pattern papers and layered them up together in the background and here I actually used the negative or the waist from a circle nesting dye and I stencl through with some blending ink now you also don't always need to use your nesting dyes as dyes you can also use them as embossing detail too and this is one of my favorite tricks to use nesting dies for so I'm going to place a number of the dyes onto a piece of card stock and I'm going to tap them all down just like so now you can do this with one or you can do it with 10 nesting dyes it doesn't matter what I'm now going to do is place this into my die cutting machine facing up like so and then I'm going to put a layer of rubber over the top now what this is going to do is prevent the dyes from actually cutting and allow them to just emboss instead so there you can see we've got some beautiful embossed detail on the reverse and you can absolutely use this side if you prefer or remove your tape and your dyes and you've got a fabulous effect on the other side too now you can pick out this detail with something like gilding wax or your inks if you wish now besides just shaping the edges of your card you can also create some fun fold cards using nesting dies now there are lots and lots of examples I could show you here but I'm going to start with two the easel and then the swing card the easel card is really easy to do um so all you need to do is the way that we shaped our card earlier is simply overlap of course the edge of your D whichever your chosen shape is over the spine so this is the fold of the the card so make sure you're overlapping that and cut your entire card base out and you also want to cut another one of these completely this is just one single piece of card stock and this will be the front part of your card the main part that's seen you're simply going to open up your card base and one of the panels you want to fold in half just like like so so fold it in towards the fold the score line of the card base and just burnish that down you've now created the easel for your card and your main piece that you've cut which is the full image will sit beautifully on top of that so you'll just glue that to the base there and you've got yourself an easel card don't forget of course that you can then use your nesting dyes to create your mats and layers your frames even an aperture and all those techniques we've already looked at for a swing card you're going to just score halfway along the front of your card in the same direction as your spine so this card base is 15 cm across so I'm going to score this at at 7 and 1 12 CM and I'm using my creative Craft products trimmer with the scoring blade on to do that then I'm going to place one of my nesting dyes that fits my card base and this is the beauty of nesting dyes you can choose whichever size suits your project best and there's so many different sizes to always choose from I'm going to place that halfway over my line now in my die cutting machine I'm going to place my paper and my dye and going to put my plate in but I'm going to put my plate forward so that the edge of the plate comes to that score line that we created and I'm going to run this through now if you look at the back of the card you'll see that that has cut through halfway we can release our tape from the front and then we can fold the front panel backwards and there's another really fun swing card card shape that you can create using any of your nesting dyes and again don't forget those mats and layers that will all Nest nicely inside of there so I hope you found that useful don't forget to check out the description for a link to my favorite nesting dies on the craft sash website and of course if you haven't seen me before please I would love it if you could subscribe to my channel take care everybody have a lovely day