A little crafting time with my bestee!

This last weekend was a blast!  My bestee, Torrey Mosely, came and spent a few days playing with me in my craft room.  No one, and I mean NO ONE inspires me more or makes sitting in my basement at midnight making card more enjoyable.  I adore this woman and her talents are so beyond belief that I can't even begin to describe them.  Go check out her blog, Left Field, and you'll see what I mean.

I got a chance to play around with some die cuts designed by another wonderful friend, Karen Burniston.  She rocked these die cut designs!  Love them to death.  The accordion album in my previous post is a fairly standard representation of the die cut... just used as it was designed.  But that wasn't enough for me!  I wanted to make one that had a bottom section on it... so the creative juices started flowing and between Torrey and I, we were able to figure out a way to make it work.  This is the result!

The way I did this was to take the die and put a piece of a heavy plastic strip taped across the bottom edge directly on the die.  Then I left the paper longer than normal.  I put the paper on the die cut with the long edge hanging over the end.  When I ran it through my Sizzix I could tell when it butted up against the plastic.  I stopped rolling at that point and backed it up out of the machine.  It left the bottom edge uncut so I could make it as long as I wanted.  Tada!  I love the way it turned out and can see so many possibilities for this technique.  Might have to try it again sometime soon.