Really?? 2015???

Oh. My. Word.

Where has last year gone? Where did Christmas go????? I am sure some little Gremlin has been on my computer, on MY blog and deleted a few weeks worth of blog posts.... 

It surely can't be THAT long since I blogged can it????? My word... what can I say..... !

I am sorry to my followers out there - YOO HOO it's me!! It really is... but I'm sorry for my lickle bloglet, being sat here in Blogland all by itself, feeling unloved and alone for so long. But I'm back. 

And I want to show you lots of lovely things you can do with your Tonic dies... and I want to do more stamping... more creating.... just sharing lots of ideas with you all. 

So, today, without further ado, I want to share you a little tutorial on how to create this frame on the card. 

You know... I absolutely love the flexibility of the Idyllics dies, and the centre of the card is part of one of our sets. You can opt to use anything in there - an image plate from Crafters, Hunkydory, Kanban, whereever or whatever you choose. But I cut the centre panel from my idyllics set and used that. 

So... what do you do? 

Well, you take your layer of card that you want for your outside frame, cut it to size to fit onto your card and make a cross from top left to bottom right, and top right to bottom left. You can clearly see the marks I made with my embossing tool. 

This helps you to centralise the largest square layering die onto your card. If all corners of the die touch the lines, then you know you are square. Simple!

Next you can cut your pieces of cardstock to a width of your choice to fit around the frame. I personally measure the frame depth and add on about half inch extra. So, if I started with a 7 inch square card, used a 6 inch square to cut out the centre, my depth of the border would be 1 inch plus the extra half.... so strips would be 1.5 inches. You can make it deeper if you prefer, or narrower. 

You can see on the photographs above, you need four strips. The length of the strip is the length of your red piece of card. Cut your border into the centre of the cardstock as shown, then using your glass mat, you can add a 45 degree angle on the corners. You need two of each opposites for all the sides. 

Now, take one of your border strips, attach it to the frame of red card with the outside edges touching. The corners should fit perfectly. Then attach the other edges to create your square. 

Doesn't it look beautiful once it's all together? 

It looks more difficult than it actually is... honestly... give it a go!

The frame was then placed onto the card using dimensional pads to give it a lift. But before you stick it to the card, decide what you want in the centre. That way, if you choose to have a piece of patterned paper behind the frame, you can add it beforehand. It makes life easy. 

And the thing with Tonic dies, and crafting with me, is that it really  needs to be easy!

I hope you enjoyed the little tutorial .... I will be back with more inspiration tomorrow.... this is going to be a regular thing - I have missed my blogging..... and I hope you've missed me!