5 WAYS to use this Woodgrain Die Set

Hi everyone, it's Lou Collins and today I'd love to show you how the new Textures Beneath the Brambles wood grain die works. So this is a really clever die that embosses, debosses, creates the most amazing wood grain texture into your cardstock or your paper. So I'm going to show you the different ways that you can use this with inks as well to really emphasize all that texture that you're creating. Now first things first, let's take a look at the die. So there are two dies in the set, we've got the wood grain piece, the piece that really works the magic and then we've also got an outline die as well. So you can use both of these or you can just use one or the other, entirely up to you but the options are there and we'll talk more about the outline die in a little while. So the wood grain die, now this is fantastic because it's around about seven centimetres by 15 centimetres roughly, so you know it's sort of six inches by around about, I think it's around about three inches in width, so it's a really good size panel and you can repeat this. So if you want to create the texture in your cardstock with that wood grain effect and then repeat it again and then repeat it again, you can do all the way along sideways. So really easy to do, you just need a die cutting machine and I'm going to be using this craft coloured piece of cardstock. Now I'm purposely going to do this in the middle of the cardstock just so I can really show you the benefits of using the outline die as well but also how you'd use this without the outline die. So in your die cutting machine, now I don't tend to change my plates very much at all, I use the same system as I would for die cutting. Now first of all let's look at this die if I just die cut it. So this is with the normal plate sandwich that I'd use for any other cutting die with my cardstock. I've got my chrome plate in here so this is a metal cutting edge so I'm going to be cutting down into that. I can feel there's a fair bit of pressure in there and when I take this out, so there's not a great deal of detail in there but hopefully you can just about see, I'm trying to hold that to the light, but there's a little bit of detail in there with the wood grain. It's extremely subtle though, it's probably easier to see to the naked eye than it is on screen but there's a subtle difference. So if you do not have a rubber mat which I'm going to come to in a moment but you want to still get texture from this die you absolutely can do this. So let's take this again, put it exactly back where it was last time and this time let's run this through my plates again. Now again I'm not going to change the sandwich too much, I'm going to have my metal plate, my base plate, my cutting plate the same as I just did for die cutting. This time I'm going to add in a rubber mat. So rubber mats, you can buy them separately, very often they will also come with your machines too and what I'm going to do is place my rubber mat down first and then my paper and my die. If you have a paper cutting sandwich where you tend to put your die down then your paper on top then you would put your rubber mat on top of that. So a little more pressure now, I can really feel there there's more pressure than there was last time when we were just using the normal die cutting sandwich and no rubber mat. Let's take this out, pop this to the side for a moment and when I open this up, well first of all you can probably see there's actually more detail on the reverse but this side there is a lot more detail again. Now so that on the camera you can see that detail I'm just going to take an ink pad and I'm going to swipe over that just with a flat ink pad, this wouldn't work if you had something like a rounded ink applicator but just going over the surface there and there you can really see that wood grain detail, you can see where that has embossed into the cardstock beautifully. Now if you want to you can use your outer die like so and you can cut this out into a rectangle. So there I've just run that through afterwards once I've added all my ink and I've got a rectangle perfectly cut down to size with that wood grain texture in. Now let's create even more with this, so I'm going to take a brown cardstock again with a scrap of white paper or any scrap of paper underneath your die, I'm just going to add some ink to this again using a flat ink pad, trying not to touch it too much to get inky fingers but just brushing that over the raised areas on the die. Now it's worth saying with this we're calling it a die but in fact there are no cutting edges in this piece, the outline rectangle does cut through, this one embosses and debosses instead. I'm going to place my inked die on my die cutting platform there, I'm going to just gently lay a piece of cardstock over the top just like so, being careful not to smudge that too much and then I'm going to lay this rubber mat over the top and I'm going to run this through nice and slowly and what's happening here is we're getting a letterpress detail instead of just the deboss. You can see that underneath we've got that debossing, now I'm going to just show you as well you can use this side, I've got a little bit of glue on there just from my plate for some reason so let's take that off, again I'm going to use a dark ink pad just so that you can see, pick out that detail, now notice this time what's picking out are the fine lines and not the thicker detail in between so that's the reverse of my die cut, the deboss side, look at this, so this is one side and this is the other so already straight away we've got three different looks with the one that's just the die cutting, very very subtle, the one here that is the die cutting with the rubber mat or cutting with the rubber mat and that's the front and then we've got the reverse as well but what about the side that we've got in here, so we inked that die, let's lift this out and then we've got a lot more beautiful detail, again it's subtle but that dark colour is in between the lines so it's kind of similar to this, not as dark obviously because it's transferred this letterpress, it's starting to look really realistic, what's going to bring this to life even more though is if we pick out the highlights so the deboss detail or emboss detail so in this die not only do we have these grooves that are pressing down into your cardstock which is what we've just done with the ink, we also have areas that are completely missing from the metal as you can see, now when we run this through with our rubber mat against the paper which will be under here, the rubber mat is going to press the cardstock through these gaps making them raised areas, now hopefully, I'm hoping this will be light enough to show you, might be, we'll see, we can go over with another colour, this way I'm going to pick out those raised areas, now I can see that but I might get another colour for you just to show you the raised areas, let's go with something say antique linen, very wildly different but just picking out those again, nice and light, so I'm not pressing very hard, I'm only going over the top surface of those raised areas, I've now got three colours in here because what I've actually got is the raised areas are lightened with the antique linen, the middle area is the craft cardstock that we already had and the deeper area is the darker ink there as well, so we've got three layers and we've got three colours, now again let's go with let's say lost shadow, this is a very light one, here we go, now we can really see those raised areas being picked out, beautiful, so you can really see the detail up and down with these, now as an example of how you'd use this on a project, I've got this card here to show you, I've actually used this die twice, so I've used it once here and then alongside here on that clipboard at the back to create the wood grain effect, I didn't ink over that, I just simply inked the edges of the die before I embossed it, die cut it, ran it through my machine, however you want to say it, so I did ink the die first to get the darker ink in those grooves and I inked around the edge, I didn't let do the highlights in this particular one but hopefully that will give you an idea of the sort of projects that you can be doing when you can achieve wood grain effects like this, now these are either inking the front or the back of the wood grain both with and without using a rubber mat, so some are just using the die on its own to pick out the detail very finely, some are inking the back, some are inking the two to colours, but just to show you the range of wood grain effects you can get using the Textures wood grain die. Now we're going to make sure that there's stockist lists down below for you and if you want any more information on these don't forget to follow us on social media because we have got lots of projects coming your way very soon, take care everybody, bye.