Jen's Ink Spot: Flipping Your Die Cuts

Hello! I wanted to share a card with you today that uses a fun technique. Hopefully it will get you thinking about some of your dies in a different way!

You know how much I love versatility in my crafting products, as I'm sure you do too! We can only spend so much money on our hobby so making our dies & stamps stretch further is important. If we start looking outside of how a die or stamp is intended to be used we can often open ourselves up to a whole new world of possibilities! This is what I found when playing with the Frantic Stamper Baby Animals dies!

I started first with the background. I used a truly genius die called the Ombre Chevron Card Panel die. I used blues to represent the sky and greens at the bottom for grass. I LOVE the options that this die gives for mixing up colors and patterns! Next, I chose patterns for the lions. They are a little busy, but I wanted one to represent a female and one to represent a male so I chose patterns according to that (more about them below). The hearts that cascade to the top are die cut in red glitter paper from the Singing in the Rain die set. I used glossy accents on top of them to make them shine.

Baby Animals Lions Anniversary Closeup Rev

I wanted the lion couple to face each other so I chose my patterned papers and flipped one of the patterns over to the "wrong" side when I cut it with the die (being careful to position the pattern paper where I wanted it to cut since I couldn't see it once I flipped the paper over). After it was cut, I flipped the die cut over and got the reverse of the original lion. Now I have two lions that are facing each other and I've doubled the ways that I can use this die set!

Here are the Baby Animals dies. You can see the direction the lion is facing.

If you are having a hard time visualizing how to place your die for it to cut out facing the other direction, maybe this will help.

Place your die with the patterned paper facing down and the cutting edge of your die also facing down.

When you run it through your machine this is how it will look when you turn the die cut over. The pattern will be on the "wrong" side of the die cut.

I thought it would also be fun to show you a few more examples of how you can use this same technique with the other animal dies in this collection. Lots of cute options!