Copy Cat

When I have a spare few minutes I do love a good trawl around the card making blogs inparticular the ones that deal with stamping with co-ordinating dies, they make such professional looking cards. One of my favourites is Dawn Mcveys blog. She designs for a company calleds Paper Trey Ink which you have probably heard of. I look at her designs and I want to buy the products and feel very inspired.

Now Paper Trey Ink are an American company and the shipping is more than I want to pay! But what am I saying I have over 2200 gsd files on my craft robo, and I can always find something very similar to what Dawn is using in my library, I can not only cut out these shapes (any size I want, which is more versatile that a die) but I can print them too for the co-ordinated stamp look. It just takes a bit of thought and imagination. Now if only I could get a decent photograph of what I make (they look so much better as they sit next to me!), these are not the best photos coming up, but you will get the idea.

This card I made quite simply by adapting a bracket shape and welding a rectangle to it, perforating a line down the centre and instantly I have a card shaped like one of Dawns! I also found in my library doilys and snowflake shapes that I used as the main focal point and layered and glittered them. It looks so sparkly in real life and is very pretty.

This next card is more graphic and simple. I printed the swirls in red and panelled it with some blue cardstock, I cut a doily shape and glittered and then printed out a sentiment (all these prints are actual cut files that I chose to print instead for a digi-stamp look) and cut a circle around it. Another Dawnalike card without me paying a penny

If you are a cardmaker or scrapbooker that is interested in die-cutting I cannot recommend the Craft Robo/Silhouette enough. I bought mine 2.5 years ago for £225 but they are considerably cheaper now, in fact you can get a Craft Robo Lite (doesn't have the print and cut feature) for about £80 if you look around - thats not much more than a big shot.

When I got my Robo there was a definate learning curve, even loading the software was hard work and then learning the software was tricky, now, however you use the Silhouette Studio software which is free and an absolute doddle to use. Add to that the Thousands of file in the Silhouette online store and the possiblites are endless. I bought a 1 year Premium Subscription which gets you around 150 files a month - more when they have a sale on!

There endeth the Craft Robo/Silhouette sales pitch, Silhouette are paying me in cream cakes (I wish!)