Perfect pattern positioning on your cards, using a viewfinder

There’s a hamster in my brain that just spins the idea wheel all day long. Usually I’m not even done making a stencil before the idea for the next one is beginning to hog all the enthusiasm. I had Halloween stamps on the boil (due later this week) and fancied a stencil for making suitable Halloweenish backgrounds. Given that one of the stamp designs features a diamond, I thought a nice harlequin pattern might be a good idea and so I made one up. Aways wanting more, I added a stencil for creating an argyle pattern, with the diamonds, I have yet to show this because right as I was taking the the pictures, folk art flowers were blooming in my brain.

Now, normally background patterns are created larger than the card front, I like a bit of overspill, so that when I’m trimming out the card front, I can get it perfectly positioned for myself.

One simple way to do this is to use a viewfinder. I make my own. It is literally a sheet of A4 cardstock with a rectangular hole cut in the centre. The size that I cut the hole depends on my project. For example I am making a lot of US standard size cards that measure 4.25 by 5.5 inches, so I cut my aperture 4.25 by 5.5. So long as it’s roughly in the middle of the sheet of card, it will work, the important bit is that the aperture is accurately 4.25 by 5.5 inches. The point of the viewfinder is to help you choose which bit of the stamped or stencilled pattern that you want to trim out for your card front.

If I were making a European A6 card, I would make a viewfinder that had an A6 aperture. I normally make two, I’ll make one out of a dark card and one out of white card, they are reusable, I’ve been using the same one for over a decade. The reason for this is that sometimes I’m making pale background patterns, and I use the dark viewfinder for those because it better isolates the view. If I’m making a dark pattern, I’ll use the white viewfinder.

Here are some pics of the process, I start out by creating my background pattern. I’m using the Mini Harlequin argyle stencil here and I’m making a sort of creepy harlequin pattern, so I’ve used red, blue and little black to kind of creep things up a little bit. When I’m happy with the pattern, it’s time to decide where to start cutting it up to be the correct size for the card front.

Next thing I do is whip out my handy dandy viewfinder to help me decide. I lay the viewfinder on top of the pattern – here I’m looking at the difference between having the diamonds be sliced through the middle at the card edges, or do I want them centred in full diamond shapes? I decode I want the full diamonds, so I take a pencil and just make a dot on the pattern, right in each corner of the aperture. I use these dots to line up my ruler, but I also make sure the are 4.25 and 5.5 inches apart before cutting.

Some folks can just do this with a clear ruler, but I find the markings distracting so a viewfinder works best for me.

Here is the finished card, with the pattern lined up just as I wanted it. The Boo sentiment is from the upcoming Halloween stamp set.

Here is the viewfinder in use when I was making the other Halloween card with the larger Harlequin Argyle stencil diamond pattern, it was especially useful for this.

Hope it tickles, thanks for popping in!