Creative play comes in all forms. I have a craft robo pro cutter that has been quite an inspiration for me. I started using it to cut out the pop-ups in my books (the first one was a miniature abridged pride & prejudice). I design the cut-out in Illustrator and then send it to the cutter (like you would to a printer). It not only cuts, but scores. Once I figured out how to use it and design for it, I started experimenting with matchbox books because it was a snap to make the matchbox container.
More recently I decided I wanted some sort of repositionable page marker for my planners and notebooks. What could I do with the cutter I wondered? I had a lot of thick clear mylar in my paper drawer, so I started with that. Worked pretty well, but the feedback I got was that they needed to be colored and maybe weren’t thick enough. After a long fruitless search for thick colored mylar, I bought some samples of vinyl that was sticky on one side. My idea was to laminate the vinyl to the mylar, but that proved to be a mess (couldn’t get it to go on without a zillion bubbles). So I tried laminating it to paper—both sides. That worked much better. If you buy a planner, now you can get a page marker too. See an example in the photo or here.
