Inchies are one-inch square versions of the fun crafting technique of creating Artist Trading Cards (ATC's). These can be amazingly detailed tiny, teenie squares, collected and admired singly, or they can be simple squares arranged to make designs or patterns when combined together.
Here is how I have made my latest punchy inchies.
Started by cutting up lots and lots of squares - 1" squares, 3/4" squares and 1/2" squares.
Next comes the punching, LOTS and LOTS of punching using my Fiskars 1/4 round squeeze punch. To punch these tiny squares, all you do is take some post-it notes (or paper with a repositionable adhesive square in the corner), turn your punch upside down and line up your square for a neatly aligned corner punch.
Keep punching until each square has been punched on opposite sides.
Adhere the layers together.
Soon these inchies will be assembled together, but my next step was to dry emboss the sentiment "Baby Girl" on the card using my Fiskars Mini-ShapeBoss. The most important thing to remember when dry embossing is that you are embossing from the back of your project and any letters or words will be a reverse image while you are working. I have found that it is easier to mark out your words on a scrap of paper as they will look while you are embossing - it helps avoid any confusion and spelling errors, it also helps to get the spacing and placement of your letters right before you actually put your Fiskars embossing stylus to work.
The fun part is to make a faux quilt with all the inchies and adhering them to the front of the card.
Another fun effect is to rotate the blocks to the diagonal. I think these would look great as a border on a baby layout.
One last handy hint to share - the post-it notes or a repositionable adhesive square in the corner of a piece of paper are also great for punching our shapes from all your odd little bits of scrap paper and cardstock. You would be surprised just how much you can get out of your tiny scraps. All I do is take a variety of pop-up and small lever punches, turn them upside down, lift the "confetti" trap open, so that I can see the punch design and then rotate the paper around until I find a section that fits. Take a piercing tool or tweezers to peel off the bits of paper that get stuck on your punched pieces. Bundle them all up into a resealable bag - you now have plenty of embellishments on hand for future projects and you have used up your odd bits of scraps at the same time, keeping your scrappy space neat and tidy.
Hope you all have a Punchy Day!!!
