It’s time for a Tuesday tip! This one can be really time-saving if you use any of the Stampin’ Up! builder punches, like the fox builder, holly berry builder, tree builder, or cookie cutter builder. For those of you who have stamped images and then punched them out with these punches, you probably know it can be fairly time consuming to get all the pieces and parts stamped, lined up, and punched. Today’s tip will hopefully save you a lot of time, effort, and paper from being wasted! I’ll share two helpful ways to line up stamps for builder punches.
The first thing you need to do is create what I’ll call a punch flash card (this sounded more fun than calling it a plain old punch card). Cut some cardstock to 3×3 or 4×4 and punch in the center of it.
Next, label the top and bottom of the flash card. A better choice of words might be ‘front’ and ‘back.’ Basically, you need to know which side of your flash card to have face for the following steps. You want the ‘top’ or ‘front’ to be in the same orientation as when you look at the back of your punch, as shown below. When lined up the same as the punch, label it ‘top’ or ‘front.’
Next, flip the flash card over and label it ‘bottom’ or ‘back.’
Here is the first way to use your flash card. Lay the stamps over it in the correct locations…
Then place your block on top. They’re all lined up to make it a snap to punch out after you have stamped!
Below I stamped these images with Basic Gray.
Then I lined up the punch and punched them out.
Now they’re ready to be assembled into the cute little raccoon! I stamped the eyes and legs afterwards in case you’re wondering.
The method I just described works best if you’re stamping all in one color. Oftentimes you will want to stamp in different colors, so the next technique will work better for those situations.
Lay your flash card on top of the cardstock you plan to stamp onto (which will typically be white).
Use the flash card as a template to stamp your images, one at a time, in the correct locations. I chose to stamp the tree trunk, leaves, and flower.
Next, line your stamped images up with the punch and punch them out.
And here’s a tree!
These two methods could literally save you hours (or days) of time if you use these punches very often. Hopefully this will simplify the process enough so that you will choose to use these punches much more often!
I have two more tips. First, if you punch a hole in a top corner of all of your flash cards, you can use a ring clip to hold them together. I store mine like this with my punches so they’re always close by when I want to use a certain punch.
Second, you could consider making a top layer for your flash cards out of clear plastic window sheets. This way they could be wiped off if you happen to stamp on them. Using only window sheets probably wouldn’t work, because they would be hard to see the punched holes, but layering window sheets on top of cardstock would work.
I hope this was helpful! If you ever have questions or ideas for future Tuesday Tips, please comment below or contact me!
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Awesome tip! This makes so much sense that it ought to be included in the instructions of these punches. Thank you, Anna.