How to Use a Die Cutting Machine

Two rollers, a crank handle, a set of plates and a six inch opening. No cord, no software, no subscription. Whatever fits through six inches can be cut on it, and that turns out to be most of what a paper crafter needs.

Set it on a solid surface and make sure the feet are gripping. Turning the crank pushes the machine away from you, and one that slides across the table is hard work.

The extended multipurpose platform folds open and has the whole reference printed on its face. Each numbered tab tells you which plates to stack for which kind of die. Tab two for thin dies, tab one for embossing folders, and so on.

Learn to check this rather than memorising it. Plate thicknesses vary slightly between brands and even between generations of the same machine, and the chart on your own platform is the one that is right for your machine.

Start with a cutting pad. Lay your cardstock on it. Put the thin metal die on top, sharp edge down against the paper. Finish with a second cutting pad.

Thin dies are the everyday ones, the ones that cut delicate shapes like butterflies, letters and lacy borders. The blade is a thin raised line etched into the metal, which is why they need the platform to make up the height.

Push the stack up to the rollers and turn the handle steadily until the whole sandwich has passed through. One pass is enough. There is no advantage to running it back and forth.

Open the stack and lift the die away. The shape is cut clean, and the paper around it, the negative, is often just as useful as the piece you meant to cut.

To emboss instead of cut, turn the platform to tab one and get an embossing folder. Slide a sheet of cardstock inside the folder and close it.

An embossing folder is two halves of a mould, one raised and one recessed. Under pressure it presses your paper into the pattern rather than cutting through it. Same machine, same rollers, completely different result.

Out the other side, open the folder and the whole pattern is raised on the cardstock. It gives a card front real texture for nothing more than one pass through the machine.

Heavier cardstock takes a deeper impression than thin paper. If the result looks weak, a light mist of water on the cardstock before embossing softens the fibres and gives a much sharper emboss.

Thick steel rule dies work differently. The blade is a strip of actual steel standing up out of a foam block, and the foam compresses as the die goes through the rollers so the blade can reach the material. It brings its own height, so the multipurpose platform gets set aside completely.

The sandwich is just a cutting pad, the die with your material on it, and a second cutting pad. Simpler than the thin die stack, and considerably more effort on the handle.

This is where a steel rule die pays for itself. It cuts felt, chipboard, fabric, thin aluminium, cork and leather, not just paper. The rule of thumb is that if scissors can get through it, the die can too.

It also cuts more than one layer at a time. Two sheets of cardstock in one pass is easy, and eight layers of fabric alongside a piece of thick chipboard goes through in a single crank.

Open the sandwich and lift the material off. Every shape on the die has cut through at once, which is the real time saving with steel rule dies. A die with twenty small shapes on it gives you twenty pieces per crank.

Check the corners of the cuts before you pull the waste away. If one shape has not cut fully, adding a single sheet of copy paper to the sandwich to raise the pressure fixes it.

The opening is six inches wide, which sounds limiting until you see what comes off it. Giant paper flowers, layered rosettes over a foot across, felt softies and pop-up greeting cards, all assembled from small pieces cut one at a time.

Petals, leaves and rosette segments get cut in batches and glued into something far larger than the machine. That is how backdrops and party décor get made on a machine that fits in a cupboard.