Get The Most From Your Punches

One of the most useful tools you have for crafting is your own imagination. How often do you buy something to do a particular job, use it and then put it away without seeing its true potential. 

Butterfly Punch

To show you what I mean I will use a cheap Butterfly Corner Punch that was bought for £3.75 from Hobbycraft. The basic design is shown below.

Basic Design

Using a scalpel or scissors to cut various sections away, a number of different designs can be achieved to give the corner a totally new look as shown below.

Trimmed Corners

Further corner designs can be achieved by adding a contrasting card/paper as can be seen in the pictures below.

Trimmed Corners + Contrasting Card/Paper

You can also extend the versatility of the punch by using it to make Toppers for your cards. A small selection is shown in the pictures below. With a little imagination I could have made lots more different toppers with the addition of ribbon, gems, glitter etc.

Toppers

I have shown you just a little of what can be done with one corner punch. In the example below I have used two different corner punches to make a topper. You may also be able to use your dies in a similar way to get more use out of them.

Topper using two punches

Punch Maintenance:
  - To sharpen the Punch cutting mechanism, punch onto cut out thin aluminium foil.
  - To lubricate the Punch cutting mechanism, punch onto cut out wax paper.

I hope I have encouraged you to take another look at the tools you have. You may be surprised at how versatile they can be.

                                                                 Thanks for taking the time to look.

                                                                                Happy Crafting.