#81 inspired by paper punches

Pam asked us to dust off those punches that we know you have tucked here and there in your scraprooms and get them working again.

Sensible advice as we all know how much they cost and if you have invested money into buying them, then you should certainly try to get your money's worth from them. Well, that's the way I think about anyway.

Punches are one of the items that I will suddenly remember to use and you'll see the butterfly or the heart or the tab appear on every layout, only to be as quickly forgotten again while I move on to another item. So it was nice to be nudged to open my punch drawer and remind myself of what I have.

No one will be surprised to hear that I have not one but two maple leaf punches that get used from on my Canadian adventure pages so that's the way I went this evening.

This layout was very much inspired by this week's Glitter Girl video where she used 4 6x6 papers to form the background. I haven't filled the page with paper for a long time and most of the other pages from our Yukon adventure are more my older style and there was a lot more "stuff" on my pages. So this will fit in more with the style of the other pages. I have high hopes of one day fishing all those Yukon pages out of the boxes and putting them into their own album(s) so at that time we'll see how well that works!

Anyway, I used both the maple leaves, with the smaller one making a negative punched border. Then I mirrored Shimelle's clustering in three placed and layered up leaves and both sizes of leaves for a bit of variety.

Counterfeit Kit Challenge November kit, Dempster layout #9

I really like all the punches and the overall design, but the strip of three smaller photos disturb me. However, they were part of the story and so they will be staying put.

It was nice to fill the page with paper so I'll be doing that again sometime soon!

Don't forget to share the details of your own punch collection over at our Flickr gallery :-)

Challenge # 81 - week of March 11, 2013

So from time to time we ask you to focus on a certain type of product or trend. And those prompts are exciting because they get stash used up...

But what about our tools? So often we make an investment in our tools (which aren't ever cheap) just to forget all about them and let them collect dust. 

Here are a few layouts to give you a hint at which tools I am referring to...

In case you didn't guess it, those tools are PAPER PUNCHES. This week's challenge is intended to make you break out those expensive (and often big and bulky) punches and use them to fill up a page. Believe it or not they are the main element on each of the pages above and with just a few basic shapes I get so much variety. The punches I used above are: large circle, small square, butterfly, small circle, tiny flower and decorative edge. With just those 6 punches I was able to create these very different layouts and this is just a small sampling of my use of them (and my obsession with collecting them). 

So dust yours off and try to use them in a new creative way. The price of this tool will only be worth it the more you use it. Use it to create your own patterned paper, masks, grid layout, layered embellishments, decorative border or fill up a background.

Can't wait to be inspired by (and probably copy) how you use your paper punches. Here's hoping I don't end up with more in my collection.

xo,

Pamage