Loving Karen Burniston's New Dies at Elizabeth Craft Design!

Since the first pop-up card I received for a childhood birthday, I have been crazy about anything that moves, pops-up, surprises me, and makes me smile when I open a card or a pop-up book.  

When I began scrapbooking, I engineered my own pop-up pages, but I admit, there was a lot of trial and error before figuring out how to make something pop up on a layout. Karen and Sizzix made this stuff all possible for card-making....but I find they can be used in scrapbooks and altered books, too!

Here are three of my feeble little attempts back in 1999 and 2000 before pop-ups were being used in scrapbooks.  Don't laugh at all the photos on the pages...I learned better design as I studied and experimented while exploring this area of art that was so new!  (At least it was new to me!)

This page is from a Christmas album.  The house is a replica of a dollhouse we made for our daughter one Christmas.

The page with the Christmas tree pop-up is from the same album that spans the first 30 years of family Christmases.

This page (above) is the first pop-up page I ever did.  It won an award at a local scrapbook store, too!  I actually used photographs of the football stadium to have the pop-up look like a real stadium during a football game.  This was fun to splice the photos so they lined up perfectly.  As you can see, these pop-ups were very limited by my lack of knowledge and good tools!

...and now, back to more about the great tools from ECraft Design and Karen Burniston's fantastic dies:

When Karen Burniston began designing pop-up cards for Sizzix, I was so amazed and happy that someone finally designed dies that would do that.  Now Karen has joined forces with ELS VAN DE BURGT at Elizabeth Craft Designs.  I am simply crazy about the garden bench, and all the others she has designed. The dies are the wafer thin ones, not limited to a certain card size, since you choose whatever size you wish to cut the design into.  Also, I admit that I am delighted with the new magnetic platform Sizzix has manufactured, making these and other similar dies easy to cut, and it is a cinch to center patterns or stamped images inside the dies.  I like the way Elizabeth Craft Designs has put so many dies into a set!  Most of the time there are dies for the card itself plus embellishment dies to match--all in one great set.

I recently decided to invest in a few of the accordion album/card designs.  These are so versatile!  From only two pages to as many as you wish to add, the dies enable us to make a card for a friend or an album with photos for our family.  Coupled with ECD's Peel Off Stickers and/or Shimmer Sheetz, their ultra fine glitter in Warm or Cool Diamond, a little coloring with Copic markers, and you have a card that is really beautiful and different from the cards I have made for years.  I am enjoying the variety of choices.  There just isn't enough time to make all that is running through my head now!


Here is a sample of one, both front and back, and closeups of a couple of the panels using the peel-off stickers, positive and negative of the designs, using Els' fantastic how-to directions on video:

There will be more to come in the near future.  So be sure to check back soon for a sample of Karen's amazing triple flip-it card!  The link to her YouTube video demonstrating her triple flip-it card is here.