Joy to the World with Alpha Dies

Hello everyone! This is Julia and I’m popping back into the SHC blog to fill in for Taheera today. Hope you guys don’t mind.

I want to show you which wonderful and clean designs you can create with simply alphabet dies. I especially love these Journaling Alphas from Neat and Tangled: the letters are nice and big, but at the same time they are very narrow so you can fit entire words or sayings on a card front. And what better to say "Joy to the World" now that the holidays are just around the corner?

You can see that I also added dimension to these letters. You can do that via a few different methods:

1. Put some double-sided adhesive on the back of your card stock and die cut the letters a few times each, then layer them up. That’s a bit fiddly, but I find this to be the quickest way, still.
2. Skip the double-sided adhesive and use some form of liquid glue. I tend to make a mess, so I abstain from that method.
3. Use some craft foam (ideally, maybe add the double-sided adhesive to the back before you die-cut?). You’ll have to give this a test run with your dies/die-cutting machine. With very thin and intricate shapes, foam can be a bit tricky.

For the color, there are many options once more: I used red glimmer paste from Nuvo/Tonic. To make it easier for me, I die cut the letters first, but left them in their card stock piece for the moment. Then I applied the glimmer paste on top, trying to spread it so it would cover about 2/3 of each letter. I let it settle (not dry completely) and then carefully grabbed each letter where it didn’t have the paste and adhered on top of its stack (the stack was already glued to the card base). This way, I could ensure to only get the paste on the very top, and not smeared on the sides. If this is too messy for you, or if you don’t have this paste, you can also:

• use Copics, watercolor, or pencils to color in the letters.
• use Nuvo’s Drops to cover the letters partially and add a nice raised effect to them.
• add shimmer with a Shimmer pen to your colored letter, and then cover it with Glossy Accents for more effect.

I’ve added a few mediums that would work well instead of the paste in the supply list below.

I hope you got inspired! Thanks for stopping by today, and happy holidays to all!