 Well, hi there. It's Sandy Allknock and today I'm going to be doing something really crazy. I'm doing string art. I've never done this before. And I'm going to throw my friend Ellen under the bus. It's all her fault. And I'm using some letterpress card stock along with these new dies from Ellen Hudson. And each one cuts out little holes in shapes. They don't cut out the shapes themselves. And each package, by the way, has twice the number of dies you see there because there's a whole second set behind each one. So lots of dies in these packages for the money that you pay for them. Each one, I have die cut. It just makes the pattern in the shape, whatever the shape is. It doesn't cut out the shape itself. So now I've got a nice flat piece of paper with a bunch of holes in it and can string them up any old way. There's lots of different ways you can do this. And I'm just going to say it's Ellen's fault that I spent way too many hours on Google and Pinterest finding all kinds of beautiful ideas for string art. This was my very first one. It's the very first thing I tried. And I was curious to see how this was going to go. One of the things that looked really easy was to pick one spot on the end of one of the shapes, make everything radiate out from it. And that's what I did with the oval. And I did die cut the little circle, but I wasn't really sure what that was going to turn into. I didn't have an idea in my head, but I wanted to see what would happen as I started making these threads go around the whole thing. There are so many designs out there. And a lot of the people who do this string art take a board and they put a whole bunch of nails around the edge of it in whatever designs they want. And then they start stringing that. This is so much easier because look how even all of those little holes are. I would never get nails in a board even like that. So I'm kind of excited that we can do this with dies as well. Then for the inner circle, that little one that I put in there, I decided I would make it also join at the base where everything else went through that one hole. But I only ended up going around to the top edge. And what this kind of made it look like to me was a feather with an interior part and an exterior part, which was very beautiful. I really didn't have any expectation how this was going to come out. It was just going to be my first try. And I have so many other things I'm going to do now. For this one, I die cut another piece of letterpress cardstock and used some dimensional adhesive to pop up the frame so that it would cover up all those holes. So you can either leave the hole showing or you can cover them up like this with another piece of paper. And then I added a little heart on some dimensional adhesive as well. And the heart is from yet another set of dies. My second one is going to be the circle. So I thought I'll try that one. And one of the things I saw in a lot of these different string art designs is circles that have almost a wreath going around the outside edge. Well, I counted the number of holes I had on the outside circle, which is 55. And then the number of holes on the inside circle, which is 44. And they don't divide evenly. So I couldn't really figure out how to make all these things join. But I did make 11 little tick marks on my paper. The reason is because this was the fourth time I tried doing this. And each of the other times was how I figured out this was not going to work out evenly because I kept running into a place where they just all got off. Like just nothing was working out right. So once I started with my little 11 tick marks, I made one row of the 11 going all the way around so that they were at approximately the right angle. There was no way to say, I'm going to always skip three holes on the inside or I'm always going to skip four holes because it didn't work out that way. But this got me started. Then once I started filling in the rest, it was just a matter of filling in. And as long as they sort of ended up around the same place, then it all worked out to be a really beautiful wreath type shape. And I made sure there was something coming in and out of each hole. Some of the holes had two strings in them just because there was a little cheating to be done. But it made it a whole lot easier than trying to ritually tell myself I had to do this number of circles or holes here and that number over there. I was always terrible when it came to doing knitting and crocheting and that sort of thing because I would forget to count. And I don't want anything where I have to count. So it was kind of nice to come up with something that I could make a little bit randomish once I got the basic design kind of stabilized. And once I finished that, I wanted to again do one of those things where all of the threads radiate to one thing. And I tried using my hole puncher, which didn't reach far enough to the middle because I wanted to put a heart in the middle, not in the middle. I wanted off center because I don't do things that are too centered. So I poked a hole and then took a lighter blue thread and just started going around from the inner circle all the way to that center one. And again, this is like mindless and wonderful and easy and simple. Just keep going around and round and round till it's all done. And then I added the heart with a little dimensional adhesive. And it looks dimensional, doesn't it? The whole thing, the only thing popped is that little heart. Next up was one that I decided to get a little more adventurous and do some criss-crossing. And what I ended up doing was counting that if I started, you know, like four little holes from the outside edge, you know, skip four of them and then start making them, you know, kind of go at an angle and then do the opposite coming the other direction that I ended up with this criss-cross. Now, depending on which die you choose and how many holes it has, you may end up with other counts of things. But try one side. The only thing you risk is having to undo it. You can really easily undo all the threading you do and reuse the same parts off, which is kind of nice. It's not like when you're drawing on a piece of paper and then you have to put it in a recycle bin if you totally blow it. Here you just undo it and do it again. And it's, yeah, it's not that bad. So I'll go all the way around the outside edges, creating a beautiful pink border and I reserved the corners because I thought it would be nice to do something different in the corners. And I saw lots of different designs that did different things with different colors and thought, man, I wish I could figure out how to do more exciting things than that. But, you know, such is life. When you're starting out on a new adventure like this, you can go for tutorials that are going to show you exactly what to do. And I debated it. I debated looking for string art tutorials that showed, you know, how to make certain kinds of patterns and I may resort to doing that. But the thing that I found was so fun about this was making it up on my own because I could do whatever I wanted. And I didn't have to worry about being right because it came out pretty anyway. And all I had to do was unstring it if I didn't like it. So the corners I decided to do in an orange thread and I just went from the outside absolute corner to each of the holes that didn't already have two strings going through it. And so that gave me an anchor for each one of the corners in a separate color. And then I used that color. I die cut another square out of the inside so that I could make another little radiating thing to the center to put my little heart in the middle. Now, before I let you go, I want to show you the rest of the release in case while you're going to get these dies, you decide you need another stamp set. Here's one with cute little avocados that have arms and legs and faces and dies, of course, for those who love your dies. And what I decided to do was to make a couple of these little happy dancing guacamoles. And I did it just with inks and a little bit of water. These are Catherine Pooler inks and it's on watercolor paper. So it gave me this really nice texture for the little guacamole dudes. And I didn't have the right colors for this. I didn't have a brown. I have no brown inks. I own none. It's weird. So I stamped an orange and then I stamped a blue over top of it and then mushed it with a little bit of water. So those of you who know your color theory will know why that is orange and blue. So I did the same kind of thing with the sun. And I painted my own sun rays around it. That's the same stamp as their bellies and painted a little bit of ground around them. And then I made my own little edges of card stock out of some scrap stuff that I had messed up. So I used the back of it and made my own card stock layers for that one. All right. Next up, there's a darling little pinata. And if you are someone who likes to smash a pinata, then you might like this one. I decided to airbrush the background on this one and make the little pinata broken in half. So I masked half of it and then masked the other half. Just move the stamp a little bit so that I could draw in the broken part in the middle with all the candy and the toys coming out. And I used another Ellen Hudson stamp set to add to it so that I'd have somebody down there with a handout catching that candy because don't let any of the candy hit the floor. I think that's illegal if it does. I didn't have time to make anything with the fringe dies, but check my blog because I might have something by now for it. And then is Squidward. This little guy is going to be my new best friend. He's so funny. And of course, he has dyes to go with him, but he's got sticks. And his little sticks, one stick has a shark fin so he can pretend he's a shark and scare boats. And the other has a Loch Ness monster on it, which is kind of hilarious. The way I made the background for this, I'll just explain real quick a new video. I cut with scissors around the boat and then I tore a section on the left so that there would be a wave there. I airbrushed the sky in the back and I airbrushed the water and then just took a couple marker strokes around the top to make it look like there's some motion there. And it says, just squidding. Yeah, Squidward, he's just teasing. He's pretending to be a shark and scaring the boats. Oh, I cracked myself up. Anyway, this card is going to be over on Ellen Hudson's channel. She has got a celebration going on with the new release over there. And I'm going to show you how to make this one, including the entwining of that sentiment, et cetera. And pictures of all of my cards are on the blog, links to everything. So you can go see if you need to buy anything else. While you're picking up those dies to do yourself some string art because it's crazy amounts of fun. And that is it for me today. I will see you again very soon in another video. So hit that like button, subscribe if you haven't yet, and I'll see you again soon. Bye bye.