Crafting Quick Tips: Creating Envelopes for Postcard-sized Greeting Card with WRMK Envelope Punch Board

If you look at the chart provided with the We R Memory Keepers envelope punch board, the A6 card size listed in the chart (11.4cm x 16.5cm) is not equivalent to a standard A6 postcard size (105mm x 148mm).

Through a bit of trial and error, I find that these figures create a pretty nice-sized envelope for a postcard sized card!

Paper size: 8.25 inches x 8.25 inches
Score at: 3.5 inches

Crafting Quick Tips: Printing Thick Papers That Are Smaller than Letter Size on Epson R2000

Hi hi Peeps! It's been a couple of months since I've last updated my blog (and shop..)! Have been really busy with my sis-in-law's wedding over here and at Germany, and before I know it, 2 months have passed!

Anyway, recently, I have been making some art prints using my (technically, it's the husband's) new Epson R2000 printer and Harman 300gsm fine art papers. Everything went well when I was doing the A4 prints. However, when I tried going down 2 sizes to 8" x 10", things became bonkers....

Firstly, my printer settings refused to let me choose anything 8" x 10" and smaller with the manual rear feed.. So I thought about leaving it as A4, but shifting my print to the top-left most corner, so it will still print correctly in my 8" x 10" paper. But you know what? That didn't work since most of the time, the printer would be complaining about paper jam. I was perplexed!

In the end, what really worked was putting a piece of A4 (or letter-sized) carrier sheet behind my 8" x 10" paper. The carrier sheet can be any office printing paper. Just make sure that the art paper is placed at the position where it's going to be printed. For my case, within the print settings in Photoshop, I still chose the A4 size and I placed the print at the top-left corner. Over at the printer, my 8" x 10" paper was flushed to the bottom-right side of the carrier sheet before both were pushed through the rear feed.

Kind of finicky, but at least, it works.

Crafting Quick Tips: Cutting Shrink Plastic Sheets into Equal Halves, the Easy & Quick Way

If, for some reason, you need to cut many sheets of shrink plastic into equal pieces (perhaps for organizational purposes, or if you're like me, need smaller pieces for craft workshops), and you happen to have a scoring board with measurements, a long ruler and a really sharp pointed pair of scissors (I guess a craft knife would work too), you're in luck! (Pardon the unglamorous floor shots coming up!)

All you need to do is to, first, decide where to cut the shrink plastic. I had to cut mine in half lengthwise, so I placed my shrink plastic on my scoring board and measured the width. I divided the value by 2, and that gave me the position where I needed to cut my plastic. 

Place your long ruler on the midpoint (I didn't place the plastic on the 0" mark, so I had to shift my mid point accordingly), following the groove at that measurement. (You simply just have to remember where you need to place your shrink plastic and the point where you need to place the ruler for the other sheets of shrink plastic that need cutting)

Then, take your craft knife or the sharp tip of your scissors, lightly score along the midpoint, using the ruler as your support. (The key here is to use a light pressure. The plastic should score very easily and accurately with the help of the ruler.)

You should get this nice scored line on the shrink plastic.

What you need to do next is to fold along this scored line. 

It should fold nicely without much fiddling.

Then, unfold, and refold in the reverse direction.

The shrink plastic should snap into 2 easily and cleanly!

There you go! It's really simple and fast, and there's no need for sore hands! (Trust me, you'll get sore hands trying to use scissors to cut tons of shrink plastic. Ditto when trying to keep a good pressure when using a craft knife to cut plastic!)

Crafting Quick Tips: Silhouette Cameo settings for cutting felt (using freezer paper)

Thanks to Felted Chicken for the silhouette settings!

Stabilizer used: Freezer paper
Speed: 1 to 2
Thickness: 33
Blade: 10
With Cutting mat + double cut

And some advice to read through before cutting..

About the freezer paper
Firstly, why freezer paper? Just because I have lots of it  and I have reserved my interfacings/stabilizers for only sewing purposes.

Also, freezer paper acts like a temporary stabilizer and it peels away from the felt pretty easily after cutting, which is good if having a stabilizer permanently stuck to the back of felt piece is not desirable. However, it is exactly this property that might cause your felt to come off the freezer paper while the silhouette is doing its work, thus ruining your cutting.

To reduce the chance of this happening, cut your felt to smaller and manageable pieces, preferably not bigger than 5 inches x 5 inches, and make sure to adhere the freezer paper properly to the felt by pressing your iron a number of times over the same area.

(Felted Chicken used Heat 'n Bond which seemed to do a much better job, but the downside is that it is permanent)


About the felt
I suggest using better quality felt made from wool, as the fibers are more compact and less likely to stretch while being cut. I used acrylic felt which cuts up rather uncleanly and some of the sharp corners are not cut right through. I ended up having to manually clean up the pieces using scissors.


About the shapes to cut out
I would not recommend cutting out very intricate shapes using this freezer paper method, especially with acrylic felt. Also, due to the felt size constraint, this method is best used for small shapes.


About the blade
Please use separate blades for cutting paper and felt/fabric. Also, do clean out your blade often to remove felt lint.

Crafting Quick Tips: General silhouette cameo setting for cutting regular cardstock

(Also a reminder for myself... So that I won't spoil my second blade!)

Under the cutting settings, set these values

Speed: 3

Thickness: 33

Blade: 3

And of course ensure that you checked the option that you are using a cutting mat!

Crafting Quick Tips: Handling finicky tiny alphabet stamps

My silicon alphabet stamps set came of great use while making the finishing touches to my postcards for the Pameran Poskad exhibition. However, my stamps set came in this tiny plastic sheet and it's almost impossible to paste those tiny stamps back according to alphabetical order every time I finished one letter. And before long, my floor was "littered" with these stamps and I had to squint and search for the alphabet that I wanted to use.

Another big minus point I had is that once I pulled each alphabet out from the plastic sheet, it seemed to lose the stickiness and refused to stick onto my acrylic block or the plastic sheet. I ended up rolling some glue tape on a piece of scratch paper and pasting the stamp onto the glue before getting that onto my acrylic block. I believe wiping a wet tissue over the back of the stamp will help in sticking onto the acrylic block too but I didn't have wet tissue on hand then.

That doesn't solve the problem of my stamps laying messily on the floor but it gave me an idea. I took sheets of paper, put some rows of glue tape, and pasted each individual alphabet stamp onto the tape in alphabetical order. To make sure I paste the stamp in the right orientation, I stamped each alphabet onto the paper first (which also acts as a label) and get the correct orientation of the stamp..

This made my life much easier as I can paste back each stamp very easily to the correct position and it's a breeze to search for an alphabet.

Sewing Tip #2: Adjusting bobbin tension on a Brother machine

Yes, my machine did a tension mess again when I was sewing my It's the Pockets dress. I had already have my upper thread tension dropped to 1, but the upper thread still seemed tight. Dropping the upper thread tension by 1 tiny notch seemed to solve the upper thread problem, but the bottom thread was in a total mess (too loose).

After pondering over this problem, and after re-reading a post by Grosgrainfabulous about shirring using the Brother machine, I figured my bobbin case tension screw must have loosened somewhat due to my pretty heavy use of the machine over this past year. And that resulted in my need to drop my upper thread tension pretty drastically to match the tension of the bottom thread so that the stitches could appear reasonably even.

To solve this, I need to get to my bobbin case. Unlike Kathleen's (Grosgrainfabulous) Brother machine, my bobbin case is stuck to the machine (I guess I could remove the upper plate but the screws were too tight. edit: after reading the manual, you can use a coin to unscrew them). However, I managed to lift the bobbin case up a little and that was sufficient for me to tighten the screw:

If you are unsure of how to get to your bobbin case, here's a very short tutorial:

To adjust your bobbin thread to the correct tension, there's a bit of trial and error to be done. First, thread your machine with a thread of normal thickness. Next, set your upper thread tension to 4 (the normal setting). Then, tighten your bobbin case tension screw. Once done, set your machine to zig-zag stitch (if your machine does not have that, you can use a running stitch, but it might be harder to see) and start sewing.

If the stitches at the bottom look funky to you, it means the bottom bobbin tension is too tight. You'll need to loosen the screw a little. If it's the stitches on the top that look funky, tighten the screw a little. Repeat this step until both the top zig-zag stitches and bottom zig-zag stitches look even.

Here's how my stitches look like after re-adjusting:

Sewing Tip #1: Okay, getting close.. (Tip to solving sewing machine tension problem..)

...but not perfect. I managed to fiddle with the upper thread tension to get okay stitches... Not perfectly even, but still acceptable.

Redid the leg hem.. The stitches look much better on both sides now.

I've also unpicked the stitches on the belt band.. Going to re-cut and re-sew it..

Belt band removed.

As to how I eventually managed to kinda solve the ridiculously tight tension problem.. VERY IMPORTANTLY, LIFT the presser foot UP BEFORE threading. This actually disengages the tension discs for the upper thread, allowing you to slide the thread in between the 2 discs properly.

Next, we need to adjust the tension for the upper thread. Remember, the smaller the number, the lower the tension. All the while I had my tension within 3 - 5 range, and I had no problems with it (it's also the recommended setting from the Brother's support page) but apparently, this tension is too tight for the thread I'd chosen for the culottes project. After some trial and error on a test fabric piece, the best tension setting that I finally settled on was 1.

Well, at least this kinda solved my problem. I believe it works the same on other machines and thread selection. Good luck!