Paper Punches from EK Success--A Review

Among the many, MANY goodies I received at the Blogger's Meet-Up, hosted by Craft Gossip, in Little Rock on Sept. 8th were these three really cool paper punches from EK Success Brands:
 

The one on the far right is unique--instead of just punching a decorative design into paper to be used in cardmaking, scrapbooking, etc., it makes a 3-d flower. Suzy, another crafter who attended the blogger's meet-up, has already posted a great review of it on her blog unRuffled, so I will talk about the other two.

This spider-and-web punch is my favorite!  It produces such a crisply cut design that it would make anything I created with it look like I have a lot more experience than I do--I have no experience in papercrafting!--so if I can do this, anyone can!

In this first picture you can see on the right-hand side that the punch design is printed on the punch itself.  It is also on the left-hand side.  I wondered why they were there, but as soon as I punched the image once and wanted to line up the next punch, I got it--all you have to do is align your punched paper with the printed image on the punch itself, make your next punch, and the two will flow seamlessly together.

I punched the spider-and-web design into black cardstock, then trimmed the paper to the size I wanted to use for a card.  I cut some orange paper to glue inside the black, and this is how it came out.  I was extremely pleased with this!  If you visit the EK Success Brands website you can find a lot of ideas and projects that you can make with each item they sell.

This next punch makes a pretty scroll boarder.  This is the top of the punch:

This is the bottom of the punch.  I want to show you that all these punches have a sliding lock that you can engage to keep the punch closed when not in use.

Here you can see that I am lining up the paper with the image printed on the punch to make my second punch.

A beautifully decorated sheet of scrapbook paper!

I turned this one into a card too, by cutting and layering a piece of green paper under the pink.

When I was in JoAnn's Fabrics last week, I noticed that they carry these punches, so they are readily available, or you can order them from the EK Success Brands website.  I highly recommend them if you want to do anything decorative with paper--cards, invitations, or party decorations will all look great with the help of these tools!