Two words which should never normally be seen together in a sentence

...I have fallen in love with punches!

So much so i just had to spell it out with the help of my actual punches as in the pic above ;)

You can use the shapes created in their own right.

You can use the holes they leave behind for stencilling and the shapes themselves as masks for inking over (though not as rough and messy as this).

Another love of mine are those lusciously dimensional chipshapes ....but what happens when you have used them and have none left and you don't have a fancy machine that can cut through thick card ...make your own of course using the originals as templates or stencils depending on which bit you are using.

Draw round them onto thin card multiple times, cut them out and glue them together. Being hand drawn and cut will inevitably lead to mismatches in exact shape but you can always stack them together see how they line up and snip away any mismatch either before or after gluing together (but remember to note how they go together) You can also sand round the edges once they are glued together and dried. This seems to have the effect of fusing together the layers (so long as you have glued up to the edges) and you can hardly tell they weren't one original piece of board. A bit labourious I know ...but intensely therapeutic and great for practising ones scissor (or craft knife) skills!

Here's some I made earlier!

(the light grey ones I didn't make - they're original shop bought chipshapes)
The heart shape was made with a punch which makes the process of making multiple shapes to be glued together soooo much easier. And the heart shape with the cut out middle was made by cutting around the outside of the hole left behind by the punch like so...

Then you can paint, glitter or add lovely paper for the top layer for use as embellishments.

..and this is where my project for this challenge began...

...as a token of my love for my punches I decided to make a label to go on the box I will keep them in...

I painted my punch/chipshape heart red and added glitter.

I used a chipshape to draw round (eg x4) to make the frame... )if you are very careful cutting out the middle you have another 4 readymade shapes which can be stuck together for another project)

I added some paper to the frame, stamped a background layer with some polka dots and stamped out the letters p-u-n-c-h-e-s.

I made some tiny flowers ...yes you guessed it! with punches. I even made the middles of the flowers with the tiniest single hole punch (to the left of the pic below).

Anyway I think by now you can see that I have a hot passion for these cool tools (sorry too many puns) and thanks to the Moxie Fab world challenge to use punches in an innovative way it inspired me to show some love for punches.

(ps come back tomorrow for a blogpost about two words which should definitely go together and a pic)