Off the Page

My sister has a very nice, framed art photo of a stack of books. One day she made an off hand remark about it and I thought it would make a great plaque. The result is a Christmas gift and made with scrapbooking supplies.

This project can be done with any die cut machine, I just happen to have a Cricut Expression II. Using a website, Cricut Craft Room, and the Printing Press cartridge I was able to cut the letters in a variety of shapes to add interest. The addition of a shadow for the letters gave depth. With the website you can lay out your project to see the scale and dimension. Using the grid on the monitor, I was able to create an inside and outside mat by telling the Circut to cut rectangles - one was a regular cut and the other was the shadow. First, the larger opening was cut, then I superimposed the smaller one into the larger one to line them up, (the program allows viewing of both images at once) the larger rectangle was deleted and the smaller one was cut. Each step/layer can be saved individually so if something doesn't line up it can be re-cut . The mats were cut separately from two different colors of cardstock. The Cricut wanted to cut a perfect rectangle and had to be slowed down to cut the mat evenly all the way around. The end product is 12 x 6.  I hope it will be well received.