Today I’m pleased to welcome Tracey Thompson as our Guest Artist. Tracey has been an active member on the forum and will be showing us her Die Cutting Machine and her experience cutting felt.
A recent post in the Felt and Fibre Forum led me to comment that I had tried to cut felt using a die cutting machine. It was given to me free by a friend because she wanted to treat herself to the next model that had more bells and whistles!
Here is the die cutter, it is a Spellbinders Grand Calibur. It cuts beautiful images in card stock but how would it cope with felt?
I tried both commercial felt and my own prefelt in this machine. The results were mixed with both felts, but I think this was largely down to the dies. The more intricate the die, the more it mashed away at the felt, sometimes obliterating it!
I then remembered that I had a quite simple die in the shape of a snowflake, and as I still have Christmas cards to make, I thought I would have another go. This next picture is my prefelt with the snowflake die and a Merry Christmas die. The hole in the middle of the prefelt was where the snowflake came out perfectly, and the mashed up bit at the bottom was where Merry Christmas didn’t!
So I thought I would make a simple card to use the snowflakes on. I put down two layers of Tanzanite from World of Wool, as I wanted a night time feel as a background.
I also wanted simple decoration, so I just lay a few blue and white mulberry silks on the top.
Here it is after felting.
I then ironed a piece of interfacing onto the back to make the stitching more stable. I had cut out a few snowflakes using a white commercial felt, and I used a double silver metallic thread to attach them to the felted piece.
So here is the finished card, it is a fairly simple one but it’s one to tick off the list!
Tracey, thanks for sharing your experience with us and for helping to fill in on my leave!