Even though I am always talking about reducing the number of tools and amount of materials, sometimes it is ok to buy something new, which will save us time. If you ask me if was I concern about purchasing We are memory keepers Alphabet punch board, yes, I was. If you ask me am I being paid for this text, no, I am not. Oh, it was actually painful to find out how much the shipping cost from USA to Australia, but…
The Alphabet punch board came, and I was impatient to try how it works.
What happened?
First, I took some paper pieces from my paper collection, matching the colour scheme of my home. All my Christmas decorations always have something blue. I love blue in all its nuances and variations. Maybe because of my astrological sign, which is Pisces, who knows?! So, don’t be surprised by the light sea blue and the turquoise paper sheets together with the silver and gold prepared for Christmas ornaments.
A very good thing with this tool is the instruction book, which shows the exact steps to follow for every letter. I am not a big “follow the steps” person and always there is something I can’t understand or feel curious about finding my own way. But this instruction book is really good, and everything is very easy to understand.
When creating messages with different separate letters, it is always very important to have the text written somewhere. This will help you with not only the spelling but also the numbers of the letters and their colours. I was so excited to start working, so I made some mistakes before taking the step of writing the word “Christmas”. Always write your words!
The best thing with this tool is it gives you the starting shapes of the letters first. So, I made the exact rectangles first and then continued with the shape of the letter C, which is very easy to make…
Which should be very easy to make…
What can cause problems with Alphabet punch board?
The paper.
You know, I love recycling instead of buying new, so I have a great collection of beautiful pieces of wallpaper. Good. But, wallpaper very often doesn’t work too well with punch boards. Especially the high-quality wallpapers. They always have some “fibres” inside, which make the structure stronger and tougher but doesn’t help the punch to work well.
See these little hairs? This is from the structure of the wallpaper. Believe me, at some moment I was sure I would break my new tool. The metal cutting parts were chewing the wallpaper pieces, it was necessary to clean the cutting blades and start again and then again… For example, the normal paper, which I tried later, was great! Perfect lines and shapes! So be very careful what kind of paper you use. Yes, it would be amazing to make letters from handmade paper with some herbs and flowers inside, for example, but maybe the work will be hard on your machine and the shapes will not be very good.
Whatever, I was ambitious and persistent and made all the letters.
Some decorations
The initial idea was to make the letters with all the colours shown and to decorate them only with white snowflakes. But the problems with the cutting changed my mind. I decided to make flowers and branches from the blue and turquoise pieces. Especially where the white lines would look like frosted areas.
And, of course, I made some poinsettia flowers. Blue, of course.
Here there is a little tip, which probably will be helpful for you and even make you save some money. The first time I saw flower shaping tools, I was so excited. I was in love! I wanted them. But it was not the moment and the place to buy. And a colleague of mine (in this time we were sharing an atelier) asked me: “Can’t you just substitute with something similar?”. This is how I found the back side of the crochet hooks. Great instruments! I am also crocheting, so have a lot of hooks – plastic and metal, with different sizes. The plastic ones are better to use, because sometimes the metal ones have little imperfections, which doesn’t bother the crocheting, but can hurt the paper. The soft base in the picture is a simple kitchen wipe. If you want to make a deeper shape for your flower, just put a second wipe over the first one.
This is the big secret – you don’t need to buy a specific tool to give your flowers a round shape. On the top of this kitchen wipe you can also make shapes with blunt knives. I also use them to make my blending tools.
You can see how the finished petal shape looks.
The next part was just to decide where to put the decorations on the letters.
And the “Christmas” letters were ready
In conclusion, I can say that the WRMK Alphabet punch tool is great. Have no concerns about buying it. Ok, because of the shipping price I will prefer to buy my next WRMK gadget when travelling to USA, but I have no other concerns about the quality and utility of these products. It was difficult to make my mind up and to change my “capsule craft” principles, but sometimes it is important to consider what will save you more time. In this case, the Alphabet punch is definitely a winner.
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