I have been playing with my border punches lately and thought I would show you the results.  It is possible to use the punches to make paper lace strips to jazz up your artwork.

The first method I tried was punching cardstock strips on both sides, with the designs matching like mirror imaging.  The secret to this is marking your strips before you do any punching.  First, place your paper strip in the punch and then take a pencil and mark both edges of your punch.

 I’ve used red pen so you can see what I have done more clearly. These will be the marks you will use to line up the second edge. 

 Punch the first edge, rotate, and line up the punch with the marks. 

 Punch the second edge. If you lined up the punch correctly your lace should be symmetrical .

 Depending on the punch, changing the width of the strip of paper used may result in very different looks. You will need to play with your punches to see what you come up with.  I found out it is possible to use a strip that was only ½”, but a 1” strip is a good place to start.  These are the test strips I came up with:

 

 

You will notice that I also made strips with offset punching.  These have to be done a little differently.  Marking the edges of the punch on the strip will not work with this method because the marks won’t be visible.

After punching the first side of your strip, decide where you want your offset to start.  In this case I wanted it to start between the flowers and halfway through the little dot.

Take a Post-it note and lay on the table, sticky strip face up and on the right hand side.  You are going to align your strip to 2 places on the sticky note: the un-punched edge of the strip sits on the bottom edge of the sticky note and the marking for the offset lines up with the right-hand edge, on the sticky part.  

Note: I trimmed the top off of the sticky note before taking the picture, so it looks shorter than yours will look.  Line the middle marking on your punch up with the right-hand edge of the sticky note

and punch. 

Remove the sticky note and finishing punching the strip.  Here is the finished lace.

Here are a couple of cards using the paper lace.

I hope this tutorial has started your gears going!  Have a great time playing with your border punches.

Deb