Still Young and Croppin': Vintage Vinyl and Well-Used Washi

Saturday, March 8, 2014

Vintage Vinyl and Well-Used Washi

I just love Spring Break! It gives me the opportunity to give my brain (and my mouth!) a rest and just be! That's when all thoughts turn to "what do I want to work on in my craft room now?"

Today it was breaking out the Cameo and some vintage vinyl and seeing what I could personalize. I say "vintage" vinyl because I think it has been in my stash since 2008 or 2009! I have some Oracal 651 and Cricut Vinyl (which says Oracal 631 on the back). Did I mention that I've had it that long because I've had some deep-seated fear about how to use it and the amount of work (translated: weeding) that would be involved?

This week I redid my Copic storage case because I had placed the fluorescent light panel a little too low in the case and every time I took my markers somewhere they slipped out of place. (Here's a link to how to make your own...) So... after my dear honey cut and replaced the dowels for me, I had to put every marker back in the correct order. I figured that since this was the task of the week I would do something to identify my markers AND personalize the top of the case.

I used washi tape (that I never should have bought in the first place!) to identify my Copics. Got the idea from a lady in a class last week who was using thin black artist-type tape to identify hers. I don't have any black tape, but I have TONS of washi tape that I never use. I managed to use up 2 1/2 rolls.

I need to get over my fear of using vinyl and decided to use some to decorate the cover of my case. I made a simple design (that wouldn't require a lot weeding) in Silhouette Design Studio. Before moving everything off of the virtual mat so that I could cut everything separately, I took a screen shot of the design so that I would have something to follow when I began laying everything down.

I couldn't move the white roller over on my Cameo so that I could feed the vinyl directly into the machine, so I used a cutting mat for another die-cutting machine (which shall remain nameless). I have tons of those mats and use them all the time in my Cameo although this was my first time ever using my machine to cut vinyl. I used the cut settings for Silhouette vinyl and it cut like butter. All of the cuts came out perfectly and the weeding was a piece of cake.

I left the white piece of vinyl on the mat and layered all of the pieces on top of that BEFORE putting the whole thing on the case. If I had it to do all over again, I would put the white piece on the case first and then add each of the other layers. I used blue painter's tape as my transfer tape for everything except for the large piece. For that, I used a regular 12 x 12 transfer sheet.