Spellbinders Modern Essentials & Bold Type Collections

I started off this year thinking it would be great to go back to some of our roots in cardmaking - let's revive some of those old tools and techniques that used to make our hearts sing! Remember those days?

So by coincidence, Spellbinders sent me some samples from their new collections that give life to some of their old classics!  The Modern Essentials sets are a revival of the "classic" shape sets, with some beautiful additional accent dies. They play well together too - no duplicate sizes, and the accent pieces can be used with the Classic sets as well.  There are also coordinating foiling plates for even more dots and bordered elements.

I received the Essential Ovals set - the shape dies alternate with dotted border dies that can be used to line a die cut shape or added as an accent to a card panel. I used the largest of the oval dies the other day for my bunny card! It's a great card size.

When I saw the word dies from the Bold Type Collection I immediately thought of the 3D Word Dies tutorial I created a few years ago - these dies are perfect for this technique! 

I cut the larger shadow die from white cardstock, set my focal point, and then proceeded to draw in my lines. (Disclosure: I had a vision for how I wanted my card to go, and this was take 3!)

Before I placed the die cuts back into the panel, I positioned the oval die and dotted border die and cut them at the same time. I popped the word die cut back in with some adhesive tape behind the opening, and layered the smaller word over it. I did add some shading and highlights to the word die with colored pencils - you can see those details below!

The other sentiment is an upcoming design from my summer release - there are several other sentiments in a similar theme and same font. Little sneak peek there! I used one of the foiling plates to add another dotted border outside my focal panel, just to break up the white space. I love that the foiling plates aren't limited to foiling - they work with ink and just on their own as well.

These bold words are pretty cool too - each comes with a layering die which is just a tiny bit larger than the top piece - you can center them like I've done, or offset them so the bottom piece is more like a shadow. The bottom pieces have texture lines on them, and that looks nice peeking out too.

Fun stuff!