Tattered flowers

I got myself a manual die cutting machine for my birthday (a Big Shot).

I had been thinking about it for a while, and weighing up options.  When they initially came out a few years ago, it was mostly cutesy scrapbooking images and I wasn’t interested.  But as available options have changed I have seen more and more things I like.  That includes pretty much the whole Tim Holtz die and embossing range, plus some of the nested shapes.  I haven’t got many dies yet, but I do have a few of Tim Holtz Alterations embossing folder range.  Plus the tattered flowers dies which is apparently the best selling Sizzix die ever (and of course another Tim Holtz product).

Anyway, the instructions that came with it are not great, so after an initial attempt I decided to check out some online tutorials to make sure I was doing it properly.  And this week I have started to play around with it a bit.  This card is my second attempt (the first was given to a friend for his birthday a few weeks ago).

This card has die cut flowers frorm the tattered flowers set.  There are actually 4 different shapes but I only layered 3 of them.  I was also able to use papers from mat stacks that I kind of like but have found hard to use in designs.  But I think they work on this design.  One is a street map (of London), one is a page of vintage measuring tapes but the colour is darker and more yellow than I like to use, and the final paper was a ledger with lines.  There are champagne gems in the centre of the top one on the stack, and the smaller ones on each side.

The flowers have been layered on brown cardstock that has been embossed with clock faces from the Tim Holtz steampunk set.  I swiped ink over to make it stand out a bit more, but the raised surface is really cool.  The edges are distressed with my paper distresser, and then it is mounted on cream cardstock.

Yes, it has flowers, but it is an attempt to use colours and papers (and embossing!) that is more masculine.  I don’t have any other dies yet!  I also wanted to work on some steampunk designs and although this isn’t really that it is kind of a first step.

I’ll play around with the dies and embossing some more over the next few weeks.  I also want to get some Nestabilities labels, although not quite sure which shape yet, which was one of the motivating factors for the whole purchase.  I quite like the Grand labels too – several articles used them as a base card that was shaped which was pretty cool.