One of the most exciting parts of creating your projects is actually cutting them out and assembling them. It’s pretty amazing to see your creations come to life and look even better than you expected. I’ve made projects that required me to test cut my images several times, especially while creating dimensional projects, so that the assembly was perfect. Since every material that you cut will require a different combination of both pressure and blade length you may find in some cases that you may need to cut your image multiple times to ensure a good clean cut. Here is a technique to save on paper and learn what settings work the best for you.
I’ve been creating cards with a group of friends. Sometimes I’ll create a project, but I hate using an entire piece of paper to test cut my embellishments and images to determine what settings I should use.
Genieva W. Portland, OR
I’ve heard others become frustrated with the process of doing test cuts because “they don’t want to waste so much paper”. A lot of times in order to determine what blade length pressure combo you should be using you’ll need to run a few test cuts. Most often times someone will fill an entire page with images and cut it out. While there’s nothing wrong with doing it this way, a more efficient way to utilize your paper would be to take one image and rotate it across your page. That means you’ll take a design, and starting in the upper right hand corner make your cut. Then mark next to that image what blade length and pressure you used. If the cuts not completely through, move the image to the side of the first image you cut and try it again. By doing it this way you’re wasting less paper and not becoming as frustrated with your pressure blade length combo, because you can see what settings you’ve been using. Paper is expensive, and in today’s economy it’s important to stretch your dollar.
Something so simple…and yet it makes perfect sense! Thanks for the helpful tip. This will be especially helpful on the really expensive papers!