DIY Lightbox!

Have you ever needed a light box? Chances are sometime in your crafty career you will need a light box for embossing, tracing or as I am going to show you in this video lining up stamped images to make perfectly spaced backgrounds. I have so many little filler designs that came on full plates of stamps from About Art Accents and I always wanted to make pretty stamped background paper but I always went a bit crooked. I used my homemade light box and was pleased with the paper I stamped like the ones on this card and tag…OK don’t look too close, Mine is not perfect per se but better than any other attempt I have made and this was my first try 😛

As a bonus if you put a sheet of white vellum or thin copy paper on the light box you can use it to view slides…remember them?

All you need is an acrylic “box” frame and a string of white Christmas lights.  I love these frames, I use them to store wood mounted stamps and projects in progress, I bought a ton of these at a dollar store once and it had been a good investment! I said in the video that I would share the link to the website where I printed my graphs: http://incompetech.com/graphpaper/ I used the Square Multi width graph paper and the circular Polar Graph one. There are other grids and graphs to choose from and play with too, have fun! I adjusted my line weight (thicker) to 3px, 2px and1px for the square grid and 3px, 1.5px and .5px for the circular grid. I changed the colors to black for both of them because I wanted to make sure I would be able to see my lines through my cardstock. If it doesn’t look right just try agin, it is free and fast to use. You can even save your grids to your computer if you like. I printed my grids on ink-jet transparency but vellum and light weight white copy paper would probably work just fine:)

Here is a close up of the sentiment I used on the card. All stamps are from About Art Accents, seam binding is from Sew true and the pattern paper I used is from the Kioshi line from Basic Grey.

This set qualifies for the following challenges:  ABC Challenge, Creative Card Crew, Divas by Design, Truly Scrumptious, Bearly Mine, Everybody-Art-Challenge, Cupcake Craft, Ooh La La Creations,  and the tip challenge at Oriental Stamp Art Yahoo Group.

Thanks for stopping by and til next time happy crafting!

PS if you want a more detailed tutorial on dry embossing with a lightbox you can read Carla’s tutorial here.