Tutorial // Letterpress Tags for December Daily

I had mentioned that I plan on incorporating some letterpress in my December Daily album, and I thought I'd share with you my thoughts on that + a little tutorial today. Letterpress is an incredibly cool technique but it requires a bit more time and effort with the set-up and clean-up necessary. It's best to do a lot of letterpressing all at once in order to utilize your time most efficiently, which is why I decided to create a bunch of holiday letterpress tags one afternoon. I may not use all of them in my December Daily, but having premade them and having a bunch of letterpress tags already on hand would highly increase the chances of me actually incorporating them in my mini-book. Plus, the leftovers would make great little gift tags for presents!

Here's my process for creating a batch of letterpress tags:

Supplies Needed
+ Letterpress Bundle
+ Letterpress inks (optional: substitute for pigment inks if you're short on time & want easier clean-up)
+ Letterpress plates - choose your favorites! The alphas are my personal fave.
+ Letterpress paper
+ Waterbrush
+ Watercolors

I had a pack of mini letterpress flat cards on hand (sized 2.125x3,375") so I decided to use those for my tags and I plan on stapling them to a 3x4 card when I actually use them in my December Daily. The nice thing about letterpress paper is that it is quite thick, so you can use watercolors on it with less chance of the paper warping.

I started by watercoloring a bunch of letterpress cards. I used a thick waterbrush and traditional Japanese watercolors I bought when I was in Japan, but I also love the Peerless watercolor sheets and think they provide just as vibrant and opaque colors. I mainly focused on painting gradients on my cards because I knew they would add a nice pop of color.
Tip: If you want your colors to blend seamlessly without a harsh line, apply paint while the paper is damp. It'll allow the watercolors to flow and blend together. On the left is an example of allowing the watercolor paint to dry before painting the next hue, and the right is an example of letting the colors blend by painting before the paper has dried.

Here's how all my tags look together once I finished watercoloring them. It gives you an example of all the different possibilities there are!

I did all my watercoloring at one time, and let the cards dry. Now it's time for letterpressing! I started by putting one of my watercolored cards on my letterpress platform base. I chose my letterpress plate and put some adhesive behind it, then positioned it face down on top of my card.

I closed the lid of my letterpress platform, which allowed my letterpress plate to stick on the lid and be positioned perfectly.

Make sure to use the ink guide strips around your letterpress plate. It'll ensure that you won't get stray ink on your plate, which may lead to a mess and stray ink! Choose your letterpress ink and add some to your ink base, then roll the ink with your brayer until your brayer is quite evenly covered. Apply ink to your letterpress plate with the brayer. Even if you choose to use pigment inks, I'd recommend using a brayer to apply ink to your letterpress plate because it helps make even coverage.

Make sure you remember to remove your letterpress ink guides, or else they'll get pressed onto your paper!

Close your letterpress platform and run it through your manual die-cut machine. I'm using a Sizzix BigShot and it works perfectly for letterpress.

Open your letterpress platform and here's your completed letterpress tag! Super simple, right? Now you can repeat the process and create a lot more letterpress tags for your holiday scrapping.

Another thing you can do is to look through your stamp collection to see which stamps you can use to combine with your letterpress tags. For example, underneath the letterpressed 'M' (from this alpha set) on the blue tag I stamped the word 'MERRY'. Underneath the letterpressed '2014' (using these numbers), I stamped 'A December to Remember'. It's really easy to further customize your letterpress tags with stamping!

Here are the various letterpress tags I ended up making with few different ink colors and lots of letterpress plates. Studio Calico has a lot of beautiful and unique letterpress plates that you can check out over here. There are several designs that are just perfect for holiday crafting!

Now that I have these all prepared, I can't wait to use them in my December Daily! Hope this inspires you to pull out your letterpress supplies and make some letterpressed pieces for your own crafting projects.

If you're interested in learning more about letterpress, I taught a Letterpress 2.0 Workshop at Studio Calico earlier this year. This class was a sequel to Tina's introductory Letterpress class, and the two classes may be purchased as a bundle over at SC. Happy letterpressing! 

DIY Confetti Ornament

Despite the busy-ness of this season, I'm still attempting to make time for some holiday crafting. I just love this time of the year and how fun and festive it is - really gets me in the mood to craft. I bought some clear glass ball ornaments at Michaels a few weeks ago, but I didn't really have any idea what to put inside them. A moment of inspiration struck last week, and I got out some supplies from my scrapbook stash to make this!

A super simple, confetti ball ornament. It literally took 5 minutes, tops. This is all you need (the twine is for tying a loop to hang it on your tree!):

Easy, right? Happy Tuesday everyone!

DIY Gem Ornaments

As much as I love our Christmas tree, most of our ornaments are generic ones - balls, snowflakes, and icicles from big box stores. I've been purchasing a few special ornaments each year to make the tree our own, but I've also been wanting to create some handmade ornaments. The gem digital cut files in the Studio Calico digital shop this month sparked an idea and I decided to make them into ornaments! Here's how I made them...

Supplies:

• You're a Gem cut files
• Silhouette Cameo die-cut machine
• Chipboard (Silhouette has their own brand of chipboard - I didn't have any on hand so I used thin cardboard I found at home)
• White cardstock
• Glossy Accents
• Heating Gun
• Embossing powder (I used Glitter Gold Zing)
• Versamark Watermark ink pad
• Scissors
• Twine

I wanted my ornaments to be thick and durable so that I can use them for years to come, which is why I decided to use chipboard/thin cardboard. I used opened the PNGs of the gem cut files in Silhouette Studio and traced two of the gems, then duplicated them. I'm making two ornaments, and I want 2 layers of chipboard and 2 layers of white cardstock for each gem. 

Since I didn't have any Silhouette chipboard at home, I used some thin cardboard that came with my SC kits. I fiddled around with the cut settings for my Cameo...I used the Coverstock setting (speed 1, thickness 33) but bumped up the blade depth to 9. It cut cleanly for the most part, but I did use my xacto knife to remove a few parts that didn't get cut all the way through.

I cut the gems again with my Cameo on white cardstock. So now I have four of each gem :) 

I used glossy accents to glue the layers together - my 'sandwich' was white cardstock + cardboard + cardboard + white cardstock. I'm using so many layers so that my ornament wouldn't be flimsy! 

Here's what it looks like...and you can see the thickness as well after I layered the four pieces together.

You can pretty much do anything you want to decorate it! I debated between misting my gem ornament with some Mister Hueys or embossing, but the gold glitter zing won out.

Embossing is super easy. First, press the gem onto your versamark ink pad.

Then pour on the embossing powder and shake off the excess.

Pull out your heat gun to emboss the embossing powder! I love watching the embossing powder melt and change color. It's not too noticeable in this photo but you can definitely tell when it starts to melt in real life. I decided to heat emboss gold glitter zing on both sides of the ornament so that a white side wouldn't be showing when it's on the tree.

I did the exact same steps for the second gem. Now all you need is some twine to string them :)

This was actually my first time using gold glitter zing; it is so pretty and photos don't do it justice. Love how the light reflects off of the gold and it shines.

And now the ornaments are hung on my tree! :)

I have a long list of holiday DIYs I want to try...many pinned on my Christmas pinterest board, haha. There's always too many ideas and not enough time! We'll see :) Hope you enjoyed this tutorial & happy holidays!

Holiday Gift Tags

Happy December everyone! I can't believe that it's less than three weeks until Christmas. I feel like there's a million things to do during this time of the year and not enough time to do them. I did squeeze in some time to work on my December Daily book (which is more of a holiday book this year because I'm doing Project Life still), but I haven't gotten that far yet. Hopefully, I can share my progress and my thought process about it on my blog next week.

For now though, I'm blogging about some gift tags I made. Christmastime is one of the only times I make cards and gift tags (the other time being birthday occasions) - they're not my forte, but I find them fun to make every once in a while. In my excitement about designing my new holiday products, I decided to whip up some gift tags...I actually made these weeks ago but didn't get around to photographing them until yesterday.

Holiday Gift Tag #1
The Nutcracker ballet inspired this first tag...I watched the Nutcracker for the very first time last year and thought it was magical. I think it would be really cute to give someone tickets to the Nutcracker by presenting them the ticket and a little Nutcracker tag in a paper bag :)

Supplies: Christmas Cut-outs I, Christmas Cut-outs II, Holiday Filler Cards, Cherry Divine Twine, Whisker Graphics little bitty bag, washi tape, shipping tag

Holiday Gift Tag #2
I misted the tag with Silver Mister Huey and a chevron mask before layering my printable cut-outs and circle tag. It was super quick to make!

Supplies: Christmas Cut-outs I, Christmas Cut-outs II, Christmas Circle Tags, Silver Mister Huey, 4x6 Chevron mask,wood veneer stars, washi tape, shipping tag

Holiday Tag #3
This was also another easy-to-make tag. After adhering everything, I added glossy accents on top of some of the confetti on the printable and the wood veneer asterisk.

Supplies: Christmas Cut-outs II, Holiday Filler Cards, glossy accents, mini clothespin, wood veneer asterisk, washi tape, shipping tag

Next on my list to tackle - Christmas cards! I have a growing list of cards to make...wish me luck! Happy Wednesday everyone :)