Friday Focus - Piercabilities

Hello Everyone, it's Christine and I am your Flourishes Focus hostess today giving you an inside look at a wonderful item in the Flourishes Store, and that's the Spellbinders' Pierceability Template.

Like all the Spellbinders products, these templates give you some versatility in bringing shape, and elegance to your papercraft project. If you know me, you know I love to pierce my creations. It's just that touch that seems to finish things beautifully without distracting from your focal image.

The Pierceabilites come in several styles, I'm going to be showing you the Victorian Border (there are three varieties in the store). Other items you'll need are a die cutting machine, and I have the Ornare piercer and mat from the Flourishes store as well...a must have for the tiny piercing holes. I LOVE this mat because it gives you so much more surface area and the piercer is so precise that you can achieve very fine holes.

Pierceabilites are designed to do three things for your projects: cut, provide a piercing template, and emboss; or any combination of those three things. Excellent value for your money.

In this first sample I focused on the cutting and piercing ability of the template. Here's the finished card, and then I'll show you how I got there.

First I began by using the template to cut a decorative edge off the side of my card. In this case, leave one side of your card under the bottom cutting plate and the top side above. Then you line up the template with the cut side down on the edge of your paper. Run this through your die cut machine and you'll get a decorative edge (with a very light embossed image).

Then to create the accent piercing on the main focal image, I've used a precut (Labels Four) Nestability shape and placed my cut out lilac at approximately the spot where I'll be attaching it. This gives me an idea where I'll want to pierce. The I line up my template on my Ornare Piercing mat, hold it firmly in place with my left hand (my Kindergarten son would say "my helping hand") and take the vellum piercing tool and pierce the holes in the desired pattern. The instructions say to use as "vertical" a motion as you can to get nice round holes, and use similar depth of pressure on each hole to keep them consistent in diameter. As you can see I omitted piercing part of the design of the template (the larger holes).



The template also comes with a clear sheet with the template printed on it, so you can also use this to see where you'd like to align your holes or embossing as well.
If you ever lose your place or your template slips, lift it up to the light to realign your holes and pierce again.
Here is a closeup of the piercing and gems as accent. The main image was colored with Copic Markers.

This second card shows you how to add a deeper embossed image with the template and to add accent color, as well as pierce. I used the other template in the Victorian set (each set comes with two templates).

I took a 1 inch x 5 1/2 inch black piece of paper, cut the first edge of the paper with the pierceability, and the flipped the template and lined it up, taped it down (I'd recommend something like painters tape, not the masking tape I used!). The I ran it through my Big Shot again with the cut edge side up. I find I get deeper embossing by using it this way. You're left with a pretty edged border that is also embossed. (you could also add the Embossing Mats to give you a deeper embossed image as well)

Next I flipped the template over and used my White Craft ink and a sponge to highlight the raised embossing with ink. Be sure to clean your templates well right after sponging.

Then I flipped the border again and added my piercing to the tiny holes.

And here's a closeup of the design. I also added piercing to the area around the sentiment and some Kaiser pearls as accent. The image is again colored with Copic Markers.

So there you have it!

The rest of the Senior Design Team Girls have also put together some decorative piercing so you'll want to see their blogs for some other great ideas.

Cindy Lawrence
Faith Hofrichter
Julie Koerber
Laura Fredrickson
Leslie Miller
Stacy Morgan