Altenew Educator Certification Program - Easy Die Cutting Techniques

The last two weeks have been utterly crazy around my house.  Contractors are still coming in and out several times a week to do some of the upgrades we've been waiting on or for paint touch-ups and other things that were not finished in the house.  In between that, I drove over 400 miles last week just getting to doctor appointments as I get re-established with my doctors that I had before I moved away from this area 8.5 years ago.  Everybody wants their own labs, x-rays, etc. and it's a lot of running around since the doctors and their facilities for these tests are a minimum of 60 miles away and two of them are even farther at 75 and 80 miles away.  I try to book things back to back but it still takes a ton of time since everything is so far apart from each other, and I always have to allow drive time as well.  I am not scheduling anything for the next couple of weeks.

Anyhow, I wanted to continue on with my class work for the Altenew Educator Certification Program and this post is for "Easy Die Cutting Techniques" over at Altenew Academy.

We are getting a painting for our new home by an artist whose work I greatly admire and whose work I follow on Instagram. Her name is Karen Hall Nitz and she paints geodes. These are not just flat paintings, but are very three dimensional.  She lives in the Dallas area and I have been wanting one for quite a while now.  I am finally getting one.  I told her the colors and will leave the rest up to her.  In addition to that, I told her that I would make her a selection of cards as a little bonus.  She asked for "Thank You" cards.  I know I can always use lots of those.


In case you don't know what a geode is, you can look on Wikipedia to get a definition or explanation of how they are formed and then search for geode images on Google or Pinterest.

I happen to have an uncle in New Mexico who is a geologist and I have long had a fascination for geodes.  He gave my mom one at least 30 (Probably closer to 40) years ago.  On the surface, the rock just looks just plain and flat and pretty round, but when he broke it open, it has amethyst crystals inside, much like the one pictured here.

You can also search Pinterest for

Geodes and see the many varieties of crystals that form inside of the geodes like the one on the right. It's always fascinating to me to see the wide variety of colors and textures inside.

So when I first saw Karen's work, I became an instant fan! I've been following her for over a year now  and while I would love to have a smaller painting in the style of "Rose Quartz" that you can see in her gallery, I wanted something that goes with the house and will fill some space on a currently very empty wall.  We have very tall ceilings in our living room and it echoes pretty bad right now.  We are hoping the canvas will absorb some of the noise.  We really don't want to put blinds or curtains over the windows because we love all the light.

Geode Painting by © Karen Hall Nitz

I know this style of artwork wouldn't appeal to everyone, and honestly, it is difficult to capture in a photo, but it was love at first sight for me.  Let me also say, this is not our painting.  But I do love the sea blue colors with the silver and gold accents.  It's very similar to the colors we asked for but we said "heavy on the gold".  Our fixtures throughout the house are Brushed Nickel so we decided it needed to have at least some silver in there to tie it all together.  You have no idea how hard it was for me not to put gold or brass fixtures in this house given my love for gold.

If you've been following along on my blog, then you know that my grandson, Charlie, and I have been playing a whole bunch with Yupo Paper in Medium and Heavyweight Varieties along with glossy cardstock so I have a whole slew of backgrounds right now.  I have also been experimenting a lot with using my Minc to get "gold veins" onto the backgrounds as well.  I still haven't figured out exactly what makes it work, but because the backgrounds look like granite or some other type of stone, I think the style of them matches Karen's design aesthetic very well and so I chose to use the alcohol inked backgrounds to make all of Karen's cards. 

As I sat down this morning to figure out what I was going to do for my Easy Die Cutting Techniques project, I decided to do Die Cut Inlay so I used a particularly lovely background that Charlie had created to make a Thank You card for my personal stash.  It didn't turn out at all how he wanted it, so he gave it to me to use because, as you know, Pink is one of my favorite colors.  He likes the grunge effect and he also likes Red - all reds and variations of red including orange, pink and coral.  I knew it would be really pretty foiled and I was right.

As I mentioned in a few previous posts, there are lots of variables using the Yupo paper, but the biggest thing is that it's hard to die cut the #144 Yupo with an intricate die cut.  So I decided to do the next best thing.  I used a scrap from another background to die cut my word and a piece of gold foiled cardstock to cut the shadow or mat for the word.

Then I adhered the sentiment strip (both the white and gold layers) to the background panel, placed the shadow die onto that and ran it through my die cut machine, with a piece of printer paper over the top so it wouldn't leave marks in the foiling.  This did exactly what I thought it would which is that it cut through the top two layers leaving the heavyweight Yupo background panel completely intact while providing the recess for my inlay technique.  When you do this, be sure to save all the little white pieces that fall out of the die cut so you can put them in place once your die cut word is adhered to the card background.

I added a couple of views here for you so that you can see the gorgeous shine left by the Minc machine.  This is actually one of the classes I had taken early on at Altenew when I first started Cardmaking and it was taught by one of my favorite designers, Yana Smakula.  Yana has a way with Gold and she is probably the one person who most influenced my style.

This particular background used Flamingo Alcohol Ink with Gold Mixative with Alcohol Ink Blending Solution but there is just no way to predict how the foiling will come out of the Minc Machine and in fact, I don't have another background like it in the many that I've made now.   Simon Says Stamp has the entire collection of Alcohol Inks available as a group HERE or in individual colors at THIS link.

I hope you enjoyed reading my thought process of how all of these cards came to be.  I like for my blog posts to be more conversational rather than strictly technical in nature and I hope you enjoy that aspect as well.  Thank you so much for stopping by today to check out my project and post.  I really appreciate all of you who take time to comment or just visit.  I listed the supplies I've used below for your convenience (Affiliate Links may be used).

Cuttlebug Die Cutting Machine Shop at: SSS	Heidi Swap Minc Machine Shop at: SSS	Kokuyo Long Dot Runner Adhesive Shop at: SSS	Ranger Multi Medium Matte Shop at: SSS
Ranger Non-Stick Craft Sheet Shop at: SSS	Thermoweb Decofoil Sheets - Gold Value Pack Shop at: SSS | GKD	Tim Holtz Tonic Paper Trimmer Shop at: SSS	Tim Holtz/Ranger Alcohol Ink Blending Solution Shop at: SSS
Tim Holtz/Ranger Alcohol Inks Shop at: SSS	Tonic 6 Inch Personal Trimmer Shop at: SSS	WPLUS9 Gift Card Layers Designer Dies Shop at: SSS	Yupo Heavyweight Paper 144 lb. Shop at: SSS
Yupo Paper 74 lb. Shop at: SSS