Tutorial Part 1 - Altering Nestabilities Shapes

I've seen a few creations where people cut their Nestabilities die cuts and tape them back together to make them longer or shorter, so I decided to do a little picture tutorial on how I alter my Nesties shapes while still keeping them in one piece. This means no taping together and no joined line to worry about hiding! Yes, there are still limitations, but for the most part, I've found these techniques give me more than enough sizes for cardmaking.

I used the largest die in the Long Classic Scalloped Rectangles Large set. It may be a little easier to understand if you click to enlarge the pictures.

First I'll show you how to make a shape shorter (or skinnier) and then tomorrow I'll show you how to make a shape longer (or possibly fatter).

How to make a shape shorter:
1) Cut your piece out as usual.



2) Place your die down, cutting edge up, then take the cut out piece and re-align the sides within the cutting edge of the die, leaving one end protruding out beyond the edge of the die. You can see below that for this example, I'll be cutting off 3 scallops from the left side.

3) Run through your die cutting machine again being careful not to shift the die cut within the die. You can see from the picture below that a small portion of the die cut shifted when I ran it through the machine the second time. However, it's so small, you'll never notice!

4) This is the shorter die cut next to the die so you can see the difference in sizes, and also the little bit that was cut off. I've circled a tiny little sliver of extra paper that was left because of the shift. I just scratched it lightly with my fingertip and it came right off.

Using the same technique, you can also make the same die cut skinnier just by positioning the cut out piece differently in the die:
Please join me tomorrow for Part 2 of this tutorial!