Hey, hi everyone! It's Amanda here. We'll come back to my channel. Today I finally have one of those tips videos. So I'm going to show you my five favorite hacks for car making or scrapbooking or crafting that can be used for any of those things. So I hope you find them interesting and I also hope that they make your life a bit easier. So here is the first tip that I have for you today. Have you ever tried making one of those full metallic die cut pieces? Where you take a sentiment die cut for example, gov'r it with metallic and both in powder, melt it and then repeat the same process two or three times. And the result is that you have a piece that looks like its metallic. Now when it comes to melting the powder, I was always using tweezers. However, as you can see in the video, I have some problems sometimes and I burned myself. Also, there was always a small part of it that wouldn't have any embossing powder. So how do I do it now? I pick up the piece by the edges. Then I place it on a piece of cork, use a couple of pins to keep it in place, and then melt the powder without even touching everything. So this way you get a perfect piece with no blank spots and you don't have to burn yourself. I learned this trick from Susana. She is a Spanish car maker. Amazing. I will leave a link to her blog in the information box. Next, change the size or shape of your dice using partial die cutting. I'm going to leave another video where I explain this much better in case you don't know what partial die cutting is. But basically, if you have a rectangle, for example, and you need a square, we are going to take measures because we want to be precise when it comes to making a square. And we are going to draw a line exactly where we would need the die to cut in order to have a square. We place that line on the edge of the platform and leave it right outside. We run it through the die cutting machine and then we get almost a square. Now we need to make another cut in order to actually have a square piece. We are going to do the same, but in the other direction. So we are going to place the die in the exact same place. To do this, you need to feel the die cut. You need to kind of feel that it is stuck in there. It's like a puzzle. You're going to feel that the die cut is stuck on the car stock. When you feel that, it's in the right position. And now we're going to fix it and leave everything that we don't need to get cut outside of the platform. And we run it through our die cutting machine again and we get a square. Now you can do exactly the same if you for example have a square and you want to make a rectangle. Or if you have a piece that is too short and you would like to make it longer, like I'm going to do in the next example. Fairhack. This is about that piece of acetate that comes with the background stamps or with any other stamping packaging. You can use this for shaker cards, but apart from that, you can also use it for two things that are really useful. First of it, you can use it as a watercolor palette instead of using your box for mixing the colors. You can use this. It's really easy to clean and you can reuse it as many times as you want. Another thing you can use this for is for this motion technique. It consists on a plain sun color on a non porous surface like this one. And then motion your cardstock onto it. If you have never heard about this technique before, I have a video on my YouTube channel where I make a bunch of cards using this technique. So I'm going to leave it in the information box. But you might think the result is not very impressive. I understand. But that's because I'm just starting. You need to repeat the process a few times. Build up the color and I guarantee you you're going to get amazing results. For the fourth and fifth hack today, I'm going to be using a press unseal. This is my favorite thing to use in the craft room. I think I have had this package for four years already. It's really cheap and it lasts a very long time. Now, what do I use this for? First, I use it to arrange my die cuts. So what do you do when you have a bunch of die cuts and you need to arrange them on the card? How long does it take you to do that? For me, it's a long time, at least 10-15 minutes. And once I have everything in place, I definitely don't want to start picking up each piece to glue it to the card. So what do I do? I take a piece of plastic from the press unseal, press it onto the die cuts I already have arranged. Everything stays in the exact same place. Then you pick it up, you apply glue on the back side, put it back on the card, and wait until the glue is dry. Remove the plastic and you're done. And the fifth hack today is about distress exciting and how they can make your fingers. Really dirty. At least for me, every time I use distress exciting, I end up with very inky fingers. And I cannot get rid of that with soap. I need to wait a day more or less for it to fade away. So what can you do? You can protect your fingers using press unseal. I have seen people using card stock or a piece of masking paper, for example, to do this. But for me, it never really worked because it will get out of my fingers very easily. So with this, you just take a piece of press unseal, wrap it around your finger, and it stays there for a very long time. So if you don't like having inky fingers, after you finish your projects, this is a great hack for you. And that's all for today. I hope you found these hacks useful and I will see you again soon. Thank you so much for watching. Here you have a couple more videos you might be interested in watching. And also you can become a subscriber if you want. If you do so and even if you are already a subscriber, don't forget to hit the notification bell. So you don't miss anything I post. Have a wonderful day and see you again soon. Bye.