Tag Archives: frugal crafting

Testing a DIY Gift Bag Die (craft along with me)

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This past year I discovered AliExpress as a great craft supply source, including craft utensils like stamps or cutting dies. This time I’m testing one of several cutting dies I purchased: a DIY gift bag die. It came all the way from China – but would it work?

Spoiler: it worked absolutely fine – I just found the design for the bottom flaps lacking, as it doesn’t enable perfect glue placement and forced me to come up with an extra step – or workaround. Watch the video to see what I mean.

Perhaps this cutting die is actually a dupe, i.e. a design they nicked or imitated (or were “inspired by”) from another company. I mean, we’re talking AliExpress here. However, since one cannot possibly be aware of all cutting die designs worldwide ever, I cannot be sure if this is actually the case with this die. It could also very well be an original design. Should you recognize it however, feel free to leave a note to this effect in the comment section below.

Anyway, I hope you enjoy this 10-minute video tutorial. May it inspire you with yet another way to use up that ginormous stash of design papers you have! 🙂

3 Tips to Squeeze Out Projects With Dwindling Design Papers

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Every time I finish a craft project, I have design papers left over. Doesn’t matter whether it was a large mini album, or just a card; always there are sheets of loveliness I have to decide on what to do with them. Will I have to throw them out, of can I come up with yet another idea?

Fortunately as crafters we can always create something else with these extra papers, sometimes ending up with more than one bonus project.

A few weeks ago I created quite an elaborate desconstructed envelope card from 3 sheets of design paper + a cutapart sheet. But even after such a large card, I managed to squeeze out three extra cards from the paper pieces I had leftover!

So, hopefully I can inspire you with these ideas, to do the same and make use of every inch of paper real estate you can manage 🙂

Enjoy the video, happy crafting!

Frugal Crafting: A Budget-friendly Card

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This week I’m sharing a tip to make the most out of your precious (and often quite expensive!) design papers: use up as much of your leftover scraps as you can and turn them into a new project, in this case a card.

Here are the scraps and leftovers I worked with…

…doesn’t look like much does it? And yet, with some simple techniques and a little bit of creativity you can still make something lovely from them.

So here’s to never having to throw away your leftovers ever again! (unless you want to 😉 )

Enjoy the video for a detailed show & tell!