Borders from A Child's Year

I realized that lately I have been posting a lot of cards so I thought I'd share a couple of borders today. These were made when I was first trying out A Child's Year in Design Studio after the program was updated with new cartridges.



I welded together some teapots and added the words "Tea for Two" to cut out from the teapots



I used the initial medallions to put a letter in the center of each teapot. By sizing the medallions to overlap the teapot by just a tiny amount I was able to prevent the scalloped oval from cutting as you can see in this preview.



Unfortunately, the letters in the medallions are not "stencil" type letters which means that you need to keep track of the tiny centers of letters like "o" and "a" and glue them into position.



When working with these tiny pieces, I find this tool helpful. It is from Quick-Kutz and is called the Quick-Stik.



You take the cap of the top and there is a sticky substance that helps you pick up the small bits of paper.



You can then place the bit of paper in the proper position and use the opposite end of the tool to make sure the paper is positioned correctly. (The pieces are tiny - the center of the "A" is that little triangle you can see at the bottom of the photo).



The centers of the "O" were large enough to put the adhesive on the cutout piece, but for the tiny bits for the "A" and the "R" I put the adhesive on the background paper and placed the tiny cut on the adhesive spot.



You can see how tiny the letter "A" center is in this photo!



Even the full letter cut outs are tiny and easy to lose - I have no idea where the "F" is!



Once you finally get the centers in position the border looks like this.



I also did a simple scissor border. I have lots of sewing and quilting photos to use for layouts and I thought this would make a cute page accent.



The cut has a tiny hole for the hinge of the scissors - at this size it is so small that it did not cut cleanly.



I recommend using "hide contour" to eliminate the holes. Unfortunately, there is only one contour to hide so you will have to rehide the holes each time you open the file (I put a note on the page tab as a reminder).



Here you can see the second test cut - the scissors look fine without the holes.



I also test cut the teapot border again. I was using the textured DCWV paper and it did not cut nicely at this size - I find that paper is better for large cuts without a lot of detail. I also do not like the look of the white core on these intricate cuts.

I didn't even bother to place the missing bits in the letters on the second cut. I decided that it would be better to redo the file using a font with a stencil feature.



I chose the "Alphalicious" font using the crown tag option. The two pieces of the design are individually adjustable (the teapots and the letters). When you first enter the "Tea For Two" phrase it is spaced as you see above. I needed to use the kerning control to speed up the process of fitting the teapots and letters together. (Kerning is simply a way to describe or define the amount of space between letters).



I could use the nudge arrows to move all of the letters into position, but, by using the kerning and applying a positive number (.5 as shown above) instead of the negative number I would usually use to bring the letters closer together for welding, I was able to quickly move the letters to something close to the proper position.



Here are the letters after I applied the kerning.



I fine tuned the placement using the nudge arrows.



In this close view screen shot you can see all of the hidden contours that allow just the letter to cut out from inside each teapot.



The stencil letters have "bridges" that hold the centers in place so the letter is still legible. Here you can see the both the "O" and the "R" with the tiny connections to the center.



Here are the "leftover" letters on the mat - they are extremely thin and delicate but could be saved to be used on another page.



I like the look of this border better - and I really like the way the letters remain intact due to the stencil type image I chose for the centers.



I am including files for both borders - the scissors are super simple but it may save you a bit of time. Remember to hide the holes for a cleaner look (you could add a pen dot for the hinge).

The teapots and the letters spelling "Tea for Two" are both adjustable but you will need to align them with each other when you resize. Remember, if you copy and paste the letters, you will need to rehide all of the unwanted contours after closing and reopening the file to make the hide contour feature active.


Teapots and Tea For Two borders (A)

Scissor border (A)