How to Make Lots of Cards from Just Two Punches

This little project was inspired by a post on Ann’s awesome blog, All Things Paper. Which you should add to your feed reader right now. I’ll wait.

Ann posted about a gorgeous floral card, in which the petals and leaves were made with a single paper punch.

Well, that got me excited. I’d love to have a big collection of cool punches, but have you priced those things lately? Ack.

You’re looking at my entire punch collection. When I saw Ann’s post, I sat right down and challenged myself to make something cool using only these tools.

After punching some base circles, I set about dividing them into quarters. I used a circle template, but you can also just fold and unfold them.

I wanted to punch these circles into new shapes, but I needed a way to feed them back into the punches.

…A Post-It note worked great! I just folded it in half, with the circle sticking to one corner.

Then, you have a nice handle! You can use it over and over again, and if you happen to punch through it, so what?

So with a few punches, you can make a nice array of basic shapes. It’s also very easy to turn out crescent moons and loops and such.

It was really fun, playing around with all the ways these simple shapes can be combined.

And then I busted out my Stickles and added a little enhancement here and there.

By the way, Ann also turned me on to these fun circle-based designs.