Crop-A-Dile Tutorial

My favourite tool out of the new catalogue is without a doubt the Crop-A-Dile. This tool can punch a hole through anything with ease - cardstock, chipboard, CD's, tin & leather. It also sets small & jumbo eyelets & also dry embosses circles on cardstock (I have also heard it will do this on chipboard & CD's, but haven't tested it out yet). One of the really cool things you can do is set two eyelets, back-to-back, to create a 'grommet', which is great if you are making a project that you can see both sides of - no more messy eyelet backs to look at!


Above are the items that I used - my Crop-A-Dile, 2 Jumbo eyelets, a scalloped circle punched shape & 2 circle punch shapes.


Firstly I attached the punched out shapes together as above - the 2nd circle is on the other side.

Now comes the fun part. Using the 3/16 hole punch on the side of the crop-a-dile punch a hole where you want your eyelet to go - it is really easy to see through to exactly where the hole will be. Just a small tip - if you are wanting to set one of our jumbo eyelets you will need to punch a 2nd hole, just slightly to the side of the first one, as the eyelets are a tiny bit bigger than the actual hole made. If you are only using one sheet of cardstock or DSP you won't need to do this, however if you are using anything thicker - 3 sheets of cardstock (like I am), chipboard, tin etc you will need to make the hole abit bigger.

These are the 'jaws' of the Crop-A-Dile, on the top you can see it has written 'base' - this side is used to set the back of you eyelet, on the bottom there is a picture of an eyelet & an arrow showing which way to sit the eyelet on the jaw.

Now to actually set the eyelet - if you can see in the above picture, the eyelet is face down on the bottom with the paper on top. For jumbo eyelets the base setting I use is '1' & the eyelet side setting is 'A'. To set you simply squeeze the Cop-A-Dile closed - it will set perfectly every time, no mess, no noise & most importantly no fuss.

I want to set another eyelet on the back to make my 'grommet' so have put the second eyelet on the bottom jaw of the Crop-A-Dile, turned my project over & placed it on top. The 2nd eyelet won't actually fit inside the 1st one just yet, but once you squeeze the mighty Crop-A-Dile jaws it will.

You will be left with a project looking like this & if you turn it over it looks just the same :). Check back tomorrow & I will show you the finished project that I used this cute embellishment on!