Making plates

For Judy...

With pop bottle cap liners no longer being part of bottle caps (at least in the pop that I buy), miniaturists have lost a great source of plates. Well, those who don't have large stashes of them saved LOL.

Somewhere along the line, I was given a ziploc bag full of paper plates - but not the jig to form them. The jig is available in 1:12 and 1:24 from Deb Laue at Dragonfly International.

So I've been playing with plate possibilities this afternoon.

Martha Stewart (among others, I'm sure) make a 1" paper punch with the scalloped edge.

Since I didn't have the jig, I placed one of the plate blanks over a nickle and carefully bent the edge of the plate over the coin.

I decided to make some plates on my computer using MS Word. I have Microsoft Word 2010 on my computer and these instructions were written using it. If you have an earlier version, you may have to play a bit with the instructions.

Open a word document

Click on insert, then click on shapes, then click on the oval.

A + sign will appear. Click on that and a 1” circle will appear. Click on the circle and “Drawing Tools” will appear on your tool bar. Click on format below that.

The second choice from the left on your tool bar will be shape styles. On the left of that section you will see some of the automatic options available. Double click on the very bottom arrow and a page of selections will come up – white with coloured edges, solid colours or coloured centres with white edges. (The default for the border is 3 pt. I change it to 6 pt. as below)

Your other option is to go to the right of that and click on the arrow beside fill for your plate colour. Then if you like you can click on the arrow beside shape outlines below that and choose a border colour. Click on shape outline again and you can go to line weight and choose how wide you want the border to be.

This first batch was printed on cover stock which is a 60 lb. cardstock.

The rims on the three lower plates were made using the nickle (in fact, you can see  the imprint on the black plate as the ink hadn't quit dried. The rim on the top plate was made by tracing around the back of the plate rim with the largest stylus I had and the plate face down on a mouse pad. They can be fancied up with tiny cut-outs or (my preference) nail decals. Once the ink has completely dried, you give the plate a good coat of clear nail polish or satin or gloss varnish.  

Tip: When cutting out the plates, use scissors with a curved blade (such as manicure scissors). Hold the scissors in position and move the paper, not the scissors.

You can do a personalized decorative plate too.

Choose your picture and insert it into a word document. Click on the picture and go into Format. Crop the picture so the cropped portion is square. While you’re in Format, choose bevelled oval. The default on that is black but if you want a different colour border, you can go into picture border and choose a different colour. Then go to size and resize it to 1” x 1” and print it.

Here's one with a picture of our granddaughter.

 Another option is to print your plates on photo paper.

Putting an edge on the photo paper is not as easy as on plain cardstock. I found, for me, that what worked best was to use the large end of the stylus around the rim on the back of the plate then run my very fine stylus around the inner edge of the rim on the front of the plate. Still not great...but better.