Hello crafty friends. I spent a happy couple of hours this morning catching up with Barbara’s Gray’s show on Clarity Social TV from yesterday, using these brilliant new collage dies. Now, my question on this card is – when is a die not used for cutting? Well, when you use it with a shim to emboss the image into card stock, which is exactly what I did here!

I wanted to try a different look again, so decided to keep the card completely monochrome. My starting point was a 6×6 piece of stencil card, which I positioned the countryside landscape die onto. I backed it up with a shim using several pieces of copy paper and then ran it through my embossing machine – the shim prevents the die cutting through the card as it’s a soft surface rather than a hard cutting one. I do think I had a couple too many sheets of paper in my shim, as it’s a very deep emboss!

I attached the embossed card onto a narrow black mount and attached it to a 7×7 card blank. I then set about cutting out the cottages – as I said the other day, these come in two sections. I cut the bases in black card and the little toppers for them in white, glued both pieces together and attached them to the card front.

I thought it looked a little bare at this point, as the background is pretty stark, so cut a few of the little lollipop trees from the viaduct set and added them around the houses, finishing with a Pinky Gray greetings sticker mounted on another bit of black card.

I’m so pleased with how this turned out, and this is a great way to use the dies if you’re not confident about piecing the separate sections together!