Paula Cooper – Guest Designer – Technique Tuesday – Arrow Mesh Cut File

The Positive and Negative of Cut Files…

Hello, my name is Paula Cooper from Artful Angels. I am a big fan of the Pretty My Page cut files, especially the sewing ones.  More on that in a future blog post…

I loved the new arrow mesh design (pre-cut here), I thought it was a great design for many things – adventures, exercise, road trips and boy layouts which I don’t do many of.

As I wanted to make a positive and negative version of the design, my first task was to draw around all the arrows from the positive version to show me where to place the cut out arrows supplied with the cutfile.

Putting the positive version aside (see image at the end of the blog article), I then continued to work on the negative version…

I stuck all of the cut out arrows in their correct position, feeling relieved they were all the same size and shape!, onto my black background and decided where to place my photo.

Picking out the greens from the photo, I then backed in with the gingham paper and decided to make a few of the arrows that paper too.

To add more interest and to replicate the hills my loved ones tacked on the South Coast path in the photographs.  I backed my layout on a skew onto a wooden themed background paper, to continue the outdoor theme and added my title.

Finishing off I added the walk details and sayings to some of the plain white arrows, as well as highlighting some by hand sewing around them in a similar green.

It still seemed to be missing something around the photograph area, after sorting through my embellishments, punches etc. I remembered the boot print border cut file shapes I had (pre-cut here).  Adding these and I was then satisfied and finished.

Here is my positive layout, again on an adventure theme and using the footprints.  This time I tucked them behind the photograph.

I hope you have enjoyed looking at my use of cut files and wishing  you lots of scrapping time in this time of uncertainty.

Paula