Milestone and a Recap

This morning I noticed that the counter on this blog ticked over 18000 hits. There have actually been more than that since I didn't have a counter when I started and since I've had to reset it at least once along the way. LOL! But still, it's a milestone of sorts. I also noticed a few old posts that have been racking up some hits lately. These are posts from some time back. It's neat to see that people must be getting something useful out of them. When I get into crafting and come across ideas that seem like they might be helpful, I try to include them here. I thought I'd do a recap of sorts. Yeah, and I also don't have any new cards to post yet today. I could just say, "Hey, be sure to click over on the Mini-Tutorial & Tips menu over on my sidebar," but that'd be too easy. I'll just recap some of the more informative type posts.

So, here goes....

• Using The Font Thing - I love this application for managing my fonts. I have over 1400 of them at last count. Really, I do know that there are a lot of folks out there who have more! TFT saves me a lot of time when I'm searching for a particular look.
• Using the Big Shot to emboss with brass stencils - this goes for the Cuttlebug, too, but I don't know what the specific sandwich combos are since it has the various plates and I just use the multipurpose platform. The principle is the same for both machines, and I showed how to emboss so that the edges of the brass stencil won't show if you don't want them to.
• The Bind It All - I posted quite a bit of info about this when it first came out. There's a post describing how the machine works. There's a chart that summarizes the approximate coil size that would be needed to bind a certain number of pages. There is also a work-around for those small 1/4" coils--this was before Zutter came out with their plastic gizmo, the space bar add on. You know, that thing that you get for free but it costs $2.99. LOL! Just strikes me as funny. I realize that S/H costs money, but really--folks had come up with work-arounds and for cheaper. Crafters are so creative.
  
• Manual die cutters - all sorts of questions came up about these when the Cuttlebug was released. Everyone wanted to know which dies could be used in which machines and with what materials. I tried to summarize the info that I found in various forums and those are in a couple of charts. I tried to include all of the major die cutters and dies, so there's info about which dies you can use whether you have a Sizzix, Cuttlebug, Big Shot, Big Kick, Wizard, Bosskut, Sidekick, Tag-along, Zip 'e mate, or Quickutz. I also tried to include info in another chart about what sorts of materials each type of die could cut, and I included acetate, cardstock, chipboard, cork, fabric, felt, fun foam, foil, HVAC tape, magnet paper, shrink plastic, transparency, vellum, and velveteen paper.
  
• Those Cuttlebug embossing folders and those Nestabilities dies! Both are so much fun! They're great to use as is, but I made a couple of posts about partial Cuttling and partial Nesties, using these folders and dies in slightly different ways. I think that the partial technique is probably something that can be applied to any of the die machines that use a "sandwich". The idea is to take some of the guesswork out of it when you want to emboss or cut only so far. Instead of rolling your sandwich combo in and then backing out, a method that's rather imprecise since you have to guess when you've rolled it far enough, you set it up so that you just roll the combo through and leave the part that you want to leave unembossed outside of the sandwich. Voila! No pressure applied means no embossing.
• Info about the Scor-It - scoring boards have become very popular and it seems like there is an ongoing dialogue about the Scor-It vs the Scor-pal and which is better and so forth. I've had the Scor-It for a couple of years and have been satisfied and not inclined to buy yet another board, so I'm not taking sides on this one. I'd read about people having trouble making accurate scores with the Scor-It though, so I compiled info that I'd found about troubleshooting that particular issue with the Scor-It.
  

I hope this will sort of act as a refresher about some of what can be found here. Also, the labels in my sidebar can be useful for finding relevant posts. Blogger seems to arrange them by frequency first, so the ones referenced most often are at the top, then alphabetical after that.