A Study in: Quatrefoil (die within a die)

(ETA: I had some more quatrefoil ideas as I was driving my son to preschool this afternoon, so I changed the title of this post and will see if I can turn this into another series.)

 
Inspired by Amber's cards for her last week as the CASE Study muse, I wanted to play around with Papertrey's Quatrefoil Cover Plate.    

Also inspired by Betsy Veldman's video on Make It Monday to die cut a negative image from another die.

I came up with this card which has the Papertrey airplane die cut from the Quatrefoil Cover Plate. I decided upon the airplane after thinking the individual Quatrefoils looked like clouds. So I selectively substituted some white pieces (impressed with the circles) in the blue background for the clouds.

 

The only element that is not flat is the banner carrying the sentiment.  

Now if you know your Papertrey products, you know the airplane set comes in a set of two airplanes and a banner. Not conducive to making a single die cut of an airplane out of a background. So -- and this is not for the faint-of-heart product-purist -- I used my metal cutting shears and cut the dies apart. Cutting just a single airplane die just became possible. Although I do have to mention that if you do this, you'll want to cut as much excess off around the die as possible. Otherwise for negative die cutting it will leave a slight impression where the metal ends.

Ultimately, I wasn't 100% satisfied with the cloud placement on this one since you're limited to the rows which have the rounded, puffy sections. So I went for another card.

This one takes advantage of having the rounded, puffy sections all lined up in a neat row. Instead of clouds, they are now puffs of airplane exhaust! I wanted to die cut the airplane coming out of the sky to make it a little more dramatic and unexpected. I left the sentiment off this one because I couldn't figure out where to put it I wanted it to symbolize a transition in someone's life, moving from one chapter to the next (graduation, retirement, new job, etc.)

I really liked insetting the clouds and airplane to make this a completely flat card.

This last card came from more playing around with the Quatrefoil Cover Plate. I cut the die in strips and colored them with markers. Then cut a circle border in blue and wove them through the Quatrefoil strips. I like that it has some interest and texture, you kinda want to figure out what's going on. Then the simple sentiment in white at the top.

Thanks so much for looking!

-Kelly