For a while now. There will be two phases to this. And yesterday, I started working on phase one. It's going to take months to do and I'm okay with that. I'll do it in the evenings watching television.
But first, I needed to choose paper and then cut the project out. Yesterday, I went through my digital paper (which is just a graphic that you print; these are nice because if you run out, you just print more, not like when you run out of cardstock that has been discontinued) and decided on designs that I made a long time ago. I picked out four of them.
Unfortunately, for what I'm making, the design can't be too small or too big. Which I found out after printing out about six different sheets with different sizes of the same graphics. Which left two.
I can deal with that. I would have preferred more choices, but two will be okay. Then I got to printing. I printed twelve sheets of paper, well, actually more, in case I screwed up (a common occurrence). That took most of the morning.
This sucks because I have all of these big plans on the weekend, plans that use electricity and our electric is cheapest on the weekdays from midnight to six am and on the weekends from midnight until two pm. Weekends are for laundry and, if I ever get it out of the box and assembled, washing the floor. I got one load of laundry done, but that's on the other side of the house, so, out of sight, out of mind.
The rest of the day was spent watching old movies via the Roku.
Today, I got a load of laundry going, took a nap (yeah, I'm becoming the stereotypical old lady), then moved that load into the dryer and started up the next load.
I turned on the laptop and got the Silhouette Design Studio up and running and started to modify the file that I use to cut the pieces. Trying to get as many from a sheet as possible. I have three different designs. With one of the files, I can get twenty-seven pieces from a sheet of 12 x 12 cardstock (pattern A). With another, I can get thirty-five pieces (pattern B). And on the last one, there are forty-eight pieces that need to be cut out (pattern C). I have twelve sheets of card stock to cut that I printed out for pattern A. I have four different paper colors. I have three sheets of each color to cut. Pattern B has eight pieces of cardstock, pattern C has four. I have a lot of cutting to do.
Then I set up the Cameo, pulled the paper out and grabbed the mats.
These are brand new mats. They're an offbrand I bought on Amazon and I've had pretty good luck with them. Today, I did not. The major complaint is too much adhesive. One of the tips for getting your paper off of over sticky paper is to place the mat and paper, with the paper side down and gently pull up on the mat, to split the two. I've found sliding a ruler between the two as I pull up, helps even more. On my first piece, I heard a crack. The mat split. A brand new mat. I got my Gorilla tape and taped the back. I'm nothing if not resourceful.
And the other problem I had was also a mat problem. The abundance of adhesive left a considerable amount of residue on my paper. If left on, the residue would collect dust and lint and that's not acceptable. I could rub it off with my fingers, but that was messy and really didn't do a very good job and the paper would bend. Not the best idea. I tried a tissue and that worked as well, but it also seemed to pull off some of the color (faint tint on the tissue). So, I tried a disposable dusting cloth, an off brand that came from my mom's house so long ago. That worked nicely. The thing is, it's time consuming to wipe each one off. I only got pattern A cut out today there are three hundred and twenty-four pieces that need to be wiped clear of residue.
I haven't quite sussed out phase two. I know what I want, I just have to find something that will work. Good thing that I'm not under any kind of deadline for this. But it will be really cool when it's all said and done.
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