Online Card Class

Stretch Your Dies – Day 1

Day 1 brought us some interesting techniques for using dies.  I was really interested in trying out Jennifer McGuire’s technique of shrinking fun foam.  I had never tried nor heard of this technique before and I am always ready to try a new technique!

The die is the Simon Says Stamp “Big Thanks” die.  I love this die, but find it too large for some projects.  This is the beauty of the shrinking fun foam technique.  I was able to shrink the foam down to a very workable size for my project.  However, I didn’t have black fun foam (only pink).  I found this part frustrating.  I used a black copic marker, heat set the marker and allowed the foam to dry overnight before adhering to my card front.  First, coloring the fun foam was a huge pain and really really messy.  I don’t mind messy, but this was ridiculous.  I ended up putting on gloves becomes my fingers were black.  The copic just didn’t dry well on the foam I was using (which I found rather surprising).  After the extended drying time, I tried to adhere the foam die to the card front which was tricky because, well it’s foam.  It likes to bend and move and not stay where you want it.  If this wasn’t frustrating enough, when I applied liquid adhesive (multi-medium) to the die cut, it reactivated the copic marker and consequently left black smudges ALL OVER THE FRONT OF MY CARD!!!!  At this point I had to walk away as I was close to throwing everything out the window and declaring my kingdom craft free forever!

The next day, after mulling things over, I decided to create a new front to selvage the work.  It took a relatively long time to adhere all my green sequence, so I knew I needed to try to do something with it.  I also wasn’t going to allow that fun foam to get the best of me.  I was going to conquer it.  I still needed to use a liquid adhesive (the foam likes to move and using a dry adhesive just wasn’t working for me).  The copic still smeared like crazy, but I was a bit more cautious and was able to make it work.

I have to say that it was one of the most frustrating techniques that I have tried to date.  I will never do this technique again UNLESS I have the proper color of fun foam.  There were some great suggestions in the forum regarding coloring the foam (like coloring the foam before die cutting it) but I think it still would be a mess as I would still need to color the edges (which I found to be the messiest part).  It just isn’t worth the time and frustration to color it.  I don’t think it should be called fun foam anymore.  How about frustrating foam?