Friday, August 10, 2007

Flashback Friday - Playing with Sizzix Dies!

This week for my flashback Friday ..... I thought we would take a look at some things I created a few years ago using the sizzix. Way before the cuttlebug and all the other popular die cutting machines that are now on the market there was the "Sizzix" ...... it was the very first personal die cutting machine and boy have they come a long way since then. But when this machine first came out it was soooo exciting to be able to die cut what you wanted.

As I am sure you have all figured out by now ..... I am a rubber stamper!!! ..... I don't do scrap booking, although I have done and could if I wanted to, I just chose not to. So when I got my die cutting machine it was with the idea of combining it somehow with my stamping. One of the things a friend and I used to love to do is to create little mini cards out of the die but folding a piece of card in half and placing it just inside the edge of the cutting line so that when we die cut the card we got a folded die cut piece. All these samples in this post have been done using this technique ........ of course it would depend on the individual die where that found would be.

One of my favourite dies to die cut was the sizzix bath, it was fun looking through my personal catalog to discover what would look good in the bath. This is one advantage of having all the stamps you own stamped in some sort of catalog .... I would die cut the bath (or other die) and then look through my book to find what might work ..... it was amazing just what images would work. Above is a cute bee from Dawnstar Studio, the brush etc were from other companies that I just put with the bee to make it look more realistic.

This photo might look a little fuzzy sorry, it was taken years back .... I think I have improved a bit since then. This is another bath die, this time combined with a cute girl from Azadi, originally she was supposed to be in a ring swimming but with careful cutting and placement she looks like she is in the bath .... the soap was again an added extra for this one.

This is an old Penny Black Hedgehog stamp, I think one of the first ones ..... hedgies sure have come a long way since then too. This time I combined the hedgie with the sizzix tree die, I added some apples from the image to the tree to make it fit into this scene.

This little teddy from Stampendous (from way way back .... I think it is praying from memory) certainly looks like he can drive a car... what ya think?


This little boy is from Printworks and is the little (or maybe big ;) ) brother to Sarah Jane ..... I used her on a card recently.... these stamps come as a 3 parter (new word!) .... you get the head, the arms and the legs and they are fun to create various poses ...... here Joshua makes a good train driver!

A bit of fishing anyone???? Sorry I can't remember the company of this one .... I think it comes from NZ from memory ......... he liked sitting on the boat trying to get in a spot of fishing!

This is just a small sampling of the fun things you can do with dies, I am sure not just sizzix dies, this is just what I am focusing on today. Hope you had fun looking.

5 comments:

jean said...

The girl in the tub is my favorite. How cute.

Anonymous said...

My favourite is the driving teddy! So adorable! What a neat idea! And with using a die cut, how easy is that for masking?! No cutting involved!

SusanBluerobot said...

Oh yes sure does bring back the memories of us pairing our stamps with these dies back then

Anonymous said...

These are such cool creative ideas! My favorite has to be the bathtub...period. (smile) I do like the Fishing Teddy Bear.

WOW - what meticulous cutting & paper piecing on the stamped images (non Sizzix die items).

Thanks for sharing on Flashback Friday.

Anonymous said...

I love all of these! Never owned a Sizzix but I do have a Cuttlebug and now many Sizzix dies that went on sale because they had the old Provo Craft/Ellison logo on them. I hope you won't mind if I case some of these for my grand-niece's birthday - she'll be three in November! I don't have the stamped images that you used but I think I have some that will work. :)