April showers...

The last two sets of Tags plus Inchies (TPIs) for the swap my friend Kopperhead organized were themed "Weather or Not" and "History. Or Her Story." For my Weather themed set I immediately thought of "April Showers" (not terribly original - what can I say?).



I had this paper from a Debbie Mumm stack and I wanted to use the word "Rain" for my inchies. It was tricky to get the paper set up so I could punch out enough inchies - there were only nine "Rains" on each sheet and only three sheets in the stack so I needed to get it right! I cut into the paper on the diagonal so my punch would reach (sorry, I guess I didn't think to take a picture of that).



I "fussy-punched" the word "Rain" twenty times but, since this stack is just paper, I needed to cut backing squares from cardstock to make the inchies sturdy enough to add to my tags. To make it a bit simpler, I used adhesive backed cardstock so I could quickly put the two pieces together.



For my "May flower," I chose the six petal flower on the Plantin Schoolbook cartridge. I decided to use the same sort of lettering technique that I used for my "time for cupcakes" tags by having the words cut into the shape (here is a LINK to that post). This time I used the Printing 101 font instead of Alphalicious.



This was very time consuming - in order to use the stencil version of the letters, you need to hide the outer contours so that only the letter will cut. I also hid the center holes in the flowers. If you look carefully at the screen shot above you can see all of the blue hidden lines. Remember, you can click on the image to make it larger. The words are not welded but the letters are nudged close to each other in order to make the words legible.



I used the puzzle piece version of the letters so I would only have one contour to hide on each letter. This was faster since I wasn't planning to reuse the file. The problem with hiding only one contour is that it will not stay hidden when you reopen the file as you can see in the screen shot above. I would have a lot of hiding to do before I could cut these again! I hope this problem will be fixed in a future update of the software.



Here is a close up shot of the flowers with the words cut into them while the flowers are still on the mat. I am always amazed that letters and shapes that are so tiny will cut successfully. I used blade depth 4 and medium pressure since this was paper instead of cardstock.



When I carefully lifted the flowers from the mat, the words remained stuck down. Even though I usually save everything - these were just too tiny and delicate for me to imagine reusing them so they did go into the recycling...



I cuts sets of three flowers into four inch strips of paper on the baby bug. The offcuts were saved for future projects - don't they make a cute border?



The flowers were adhered to textured cardstock circles in a pretty pale pink. I added a "skittle" to the inchie for a raindrop and punched through the tag and the inchie to tie them together with some thin ribbon.



Here are my 20 TPIs ready to send for swapping - I have come to the conclusion that 20 of the same thing is a lot to make!