Tuesday, September 9, 2008

A gift for my Big Shot club members...and a tutorial for you! :)

Hi everyone!!!
I have 2 Big Shot clubs going simultaneously right now and I wanted to make them a gift using the big shot for our first meeting. I had thought that several of them didn't have experience with a die cutting system....so I thought a note pad was in order. I was originally going to alter a small tablet with dies in the Big Shot....but then, it hit me....why not make the tablet????

These were super fun to make!! The cover is old olive. I stamped the flowers from Pocket Silhouettes - on sale this month....contact me right away to place your order - first with old olive and then the top flower with whisper white craft ink. I left the covers dry over night. I could have dried them with a heat tool, but it was evening...so I thought just leave them sit over night.... The sentiments "Thank You" is from Fresh Cuts. I stamped that in elegant eggplant and punched it out with the large oval punch. I gave it a mat with an elegant eggplant oval punched with the brand new wide oval. Then placed a small accent flower on the side with a more mustard flower from three for you punch. Adhered that with a brad from the vintage brads set. Wanna see it up close?

The front and back covers were made with one pass through the big shot. It cut through two layers of card stock like butter!!! I then cut five sheets of printer paper at a time to create the pages....again...like butter.

To get the pages all cut even, I lined up the top and bottom notch at the two inch mark on my table top trimmer and cut off all of the ends. Your ends will look like this:


Next, I stacked my cover, 20 pages and back cover in little piles. And then I though to myself....what if I don't punch the holes in a perfectly straight line and the tablet is a willy-wonkus??? ( Those aren't the exact words I thought...but you get the picture....lol!!!)

So I made a template out of a piece of the tablet paper. I folded it in half long ways and punched a hole. That way, I could use that as a template and I knew the holes were in line. If I had a home binding system, I wouldn't have had to go through that last step...but I don't. I would rather spend that money on big shot stuff or stamps :):):) Here is what the template looked like:


I placed that template on top of each tablet stack and punched the holes with my crop-a-dile...again...the crop-a-dile went through the entire tablet at once, with no trouble!!! Stampin' Up! must get it that we stampers need tools that can do more than one little sheet of paper at a time....thanks Stampin' Up!!!!

I bound them together with little o rings and accented that with olive, mustard and eggplant ribbons. A girl can never "over ribbon" anything.....

Leave me a comment and let me know what you think about these little note pads.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

I love mine. When I saw your pile of chopped off edges I thought (and I'm sure you already have them stashed!) "wow, wouldn't those be great "brackets" on a scrapbook page or a card".

thanks, Gina...and yes, Fran's jealous.

Paris

Anonymous said...

I am a proud owner of one of these tablets and I simply love it and the color combo. I can't wait to get my Big Shot ( we were calling it the Big Boss!! cuz it is BOSS!!!!!)

Stephanie

Anonymous said...

Very cute. Thanks for sharing :)