Martha Stewart punches

Well, we had a blinder of a show when we had the Martha Stewart punches on - so what's the hype about. Well, they are lovely. Good quality, and great designs. I took them home to have a little play, and just wanted to share this with you.

From the Martha Stewart book I got the idea of using the punches to decorate a wrapped present, which looked lovely. For the show I did it really plain - the word of course is sophisticated! However, to play I grunged it up!

Now to make a perfect matching ribbon, so both sides co-ordinate, you need to fold the paper or card in half, and feed this into your punch, holding the punch upside down so you can see the crease mark in the card, put this centrally in the punch:



Punch along the line, as usual, then turn the card over, fold in half again then line up the crease line to the centre of the punch again. Because you have worked out the centre of the card you can achieve a beautiful ribbon effect:



Try this with all the punches, and remember you can do any length - on my play I used good old brown paper - cut quite long to wrap around the present, and of course you can still match up the pattern by just folding a piece of paper and making sure the punch lines up at both sides.



I used my new ribbon to decorate my parcel, which I stamped, inked, added tags and string and also added an image from a magazine (it's such a cool mag that I picked up, mainly for the images actually it's called Pigeons and Peacocks). The paper ribbon has been inked before sticking to the parcel. I cut one piece of the flower which I folded in half which really adds dimension. Finished with ribbons and more string, and some gel pen detail, this makes an unusual but different wrapping.