Hi friends, I’ve seen lots of questions on how to use the Clear Cuts in our Facebook community. I know they are something I struggle with using and I recently had some friends over and let them play with my supplies. They had a blast playing with the clear cuts and gave me so many ideas. Those are my favorite moments, when the teacher becomes the student. So, they inspired me to pull them out and play with them myself and while it’s different than what I normally do, I’m a huge advocate for trying new things. Recently, we were discussing how hard change is and it made me think of the phrase, “without change there would be no butterflies”. I was thinking surely there’s a verse that would go perfectly with that. I instantly thought of Romans 12:2 and knew it would the perfect place to do a butterfly page. I love all the butterflies that come in some of the clear cuts packs as well as the large alphabets… so that led me to deciding to show 3 ways to use the clear cuts.
LAYERING
This was the one thing my friends were really good at and I think what they had the most fun with. First they layered a clear cut pattern over the top of patterned paper from the paper pads. My favorite was the black polka dot paper behind the flowers. Since there are two in each pad, I was able to re-create it and then I added some more paper with clear cuts over the top to create a fun tip-in that I attached to the top of the page so I could flip it up and down.
Then they layered two of the crosses clear cuts over each other and I was like ‘OH MY GRAPES!!!’ I’m totally hooked on this layering thing now.
PAINTING
I then showed them one of the techniques I had done previously which is to paint on the back side to bring out the pattern more. I showed them the flowers I had done previously.
I was thinking this would be fun to frame and I love how just that little layer of paint on the back makes the words pop from the pattern behind it.
FUSSY CUT & PASTE
This one was inspired by the large alphabets and the butterflies. I bent the butterflies in half and only taped down the center so that they looked like they were flying off the page. I find that the key to not seeing the tape is to make sure you tape behind a pattern rather than the clear part.
