Time Saving Tip - Die Cut Shapes!

Welcome friends, are you ready for a time saving tip? Today’s tip, like many of those I share, is simple but it can save you a lot of time in your craft area. It also helps with craft room organization!

Today's time saving tip is to create basic shape die cuts and keep them on hand to use when you're creating projects!

Time Saving Tip Video

Watch along here as I explain today’s tip!

Die Cut Shapes

Here is today’s tip – spend a few minutes die cutting basic shapes to keep on hand in your craft area. Use a 5 1/2″ x 8 1/2″ piece of cardstock (half of a full sheet) and fit as many basic shapes on as possible. Crank it through your Cut & Emboss machine to cut several shapes at one time. Then find an envelope or other place to store these shapes, and you’ll have them on hand to pull out when you’re creating.

I’m showing this with my Stitched Rectangles die set, but you can do this with circles, ovals, squares, tags, and any other basic shapes you use often.

Project Samples

You may be wondering, well this won’t help me when I create several of a particular card because I’ll have different sizes, and not a lot of the same size die cut. Keep in mind, if you’re making multiples of a card, they don’t have to be identical. Take a look at the cards shown below. I used the same basic design but changed up the size of the die cut. This means I was able to make these cards with less ‘cranks’ through my die cutting machine since I could lay several dies of different sizes on the platform at once. If I wanted to use the exact same size of die cut on the cards, I would have needed to send that same die through the machine each time, whereas this way I could cut four rectangles at once.

Here’s the same basic leaf design, with slight changes for the different size die cuts.

These cards show the same idea with the duck stamp instead of leaves.

I wanted to create a card with the fox stamp as well, so here’s one example.

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