...WMS dies, die masking technique.

With our new dies releasing this month I have been playing around with them, looking at what I can do with them - i love to get the best value possible from all WMS product and dies are going to be such fun in so many ways!

Our dies are going to be a mixture of both open dies, and closed dies depending on what suits the stamp it matches or the purpose of the die. For this post I'm using a closed die from the Little Lanterns Die Set.

Closed dies are dies that you cannot see through, they are not open  in the middle section. Closed dies will have little round target holes and while these are so handy dandy for lining up die cuts, the target holes also cut the card. this is absoltely no problem when I am die cutting the actual shape, but when I want to use the negative space left by the die cut, I might not want to see those little circles, let me show you what I did.

1. The lantern die is lying on the white card, cutting side up - you can see the two target circles, one on either side. I'm going to mask those using a teeny tiny piece of the tan embossing mat that I have. It's an old mat, I'm currently using a fresher one, but it is great for this purpose, if you don't wish to sacrifice a tan mat to this process you could try a little piece of thin cork or some tiny pieces of card stacked up. You can see in the photo that I have trimmed off a tiny corner of the mat and cut it into two.

2. You can see where I have taped the little rubber mat pieces over the target circles, the lantern too is also taped to the white card that it sits on, this is just a piece of scrap card, it's there so I don't get tape gum all over my Grand Calibur Base plate. the tape is so thin that it does not matter if it happens to sit over the cutting die, it won't interfere with the cut.

3. I set the cardstock down on top of the die before setting the cutting mat on and passing it through the Calibur.

4. When it come out the other side, I have a nice negative shape on the red cardstock with no unnecessary target holes. This is the technique I used to make the negative shape for the front of my card, hope it tickles!

For my card I used: Zig Zag Backgrounder, Little lanterns, Little lanterns die set and Light of the world sentiments. inks were SU Cherry Cobbler, Tsukineko Versafine Black and SU daffodil and Wplus9 White. I clear embossed the sentiment with wow ultra fine clear embossing powder.