{new and old} favourite tools in my studio this week

I just love it when I find a new tool to use for crafting. I picked up the crop-a-dile corner chomper when we were in the USA a few weeks ago ... I haven't seen it in Canada yet but I'm sure that it will be soon. I have a number of different crop-a-dile tools but this is my favourite one right now. I just printed off some new business cards for myself and used this tool to round off the corners ... something that would have taken me all night to do with my old corner cropper that did one piece of paper at a time ... this tool does a few cards at once and it is so easy to use.

I "borrowed" some of my husband's tools in his workshop to bend these vintage silver forks into business card holders for my desk ... they are quite fun to make so I have a feeling that I will be looking for some more forks to upcycle!

I'm helping a friend's daughter with her wedding ... she is getting married next summer and I'm making their wedding stationery. We have been looking for fabrics to use for the reception decor and from there I can figure out colours and design elements. I love my pantone colour books when I'm working on projects like this ... it helps me to figure out ink colours for printing. I was also soooo excited to find this really awesome book at the bookstore this week ... it is called "Drip.Dot.Swirl" and it is by Von Glitschka. It has 94 copyright free patterns in it to use for designing ... the book is so inspiring and there is a dvd at the back of the book with all of the art files. I'm not sure if I will use any of the patterns it in the wedding stationery but it has been very inspiring. I've been working in Photoshop a lot lately but I think that I may start playing in Illustrator for a while!

My husband bought me a new printer over a year ago ... we were having a problem finding inks and he bought the new one without me as a surprise. The new printer is a great colour printer but unfortunately it has a terrible scanner. I hate using it to scan so much that I have been avoiding doing any work that involves scanning. Well I've been drawing elements to be used for the wedding stationery all week ... I just LOVE my letraset bleed resistant paper pads and pigma art pens ... and I had to breakdown and use the scanner this morning. Let's just say that my printer is still not one of my favourite tools in my studio. With back to school just around the corner, I think that I'm going to start checking out the sale flyers for printers. I'm pretty sure that Kelly Rae Roberts mentioned the name of a printer/scanner that she uses to scan larger canvases in her e-course ... if anyone else has a recommendation for a good one - please let me know!