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Scor-It

A Great Tool for Scoring Paper Crafts and Making Paper Hinges

Look at my New Toy – a Scor-it Paper Scoring Board!

Make professional quality hinge scores and lots of other neat things with the Scor-it Board.

I got this letter a while back.

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Hi, I like your website but have a suggestion regarding your scoring technique.

To create a professional score you need to produce a hinge score. Please check out my Scor-it Board which creates professional quality scores and embossed lines by hand. If you have any thoughts, questions or ideas, please contact me.

Thank you,

Tim

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I contacted Tim – who turns out to be the president of the Hammonds Group which makes Scor-it. Cool! He offered to send me a Scor-it Mini to play with.

Here’s how Eileen used to score cards.

Here’s Eileen playing with her new Scor-it Mini. Woo-hoo! Now my Open Door Cards can have real hinges.

I haven’t done any fancy projects with my new toy yet, but I sure can see the potential. My brain is overflowing with ideas: folded hidden picture book; accordion-fold cards; pop-up cards; venetian blind cards.

I gotta go play with this before my head explodes!

Review of the Scor-it Board

In the meantime, let me tell you a bit more about paper scoring.

The Scor-it Board method has some similarities to the way I used to score my paper craft projects. Both methods use rulers, a straightedge to anchor the work and a scoring tool. My scoring tool was a little cheese spreader. LOL.

Now for the differences …

Where my ruler runs from right to left (1 to 12 inches), the Scor-it ruler is a centering ruler to help you position your work.

The Scor-it Board comes with a stop-guide that clamps in place.

If you are doing multiple copies (as I frequently do), you could position each piece blindfolded – though I’m not recommending that! – by placing one edge against the stop guide.

The Scor-it Board work surface is a rubber mat to keep your work from slipping.

Those differences are all improvements over my old method; but here’s the real biggie which gives you the hinge fold.

Though the Scor-it scoring tool has a similar shape to my cheese spreader, there is a critical difference.

Rather than a sharp edge for scoring, the clever wooden tool has a notch on the bottom! The notch fits over a metal strip running down the center of the Scor-it Board.

This is what creates the telltale ridge that marks a professional hinge score. Better yet, a hinge score can be created across any angle of the paper’s grain. I’ll go into the implications of that flexibility later.

For those who don’t know exactly what a “hinge score” is, I flipped through my stack of last year’s Christmas cards to help explain.

I was surprised to see that only half of them have hinge scores; but not surprised to see that it was the higher quality half. A hinge score definitely looks cleaner, sharper and folds more neatly.

A hinge score is the type that is made by a letterpress machine.

With the Scor-it Board, you can create professional-quality hinge scores at home.

If you open a high-quality card and examine the fold, you’ll see a little ridge running along the fold line. This make for a nice sharp fold line whether with the paper’s grain or against it.

When you’re scoring cards the old fashioned way, you normally want to score along the paper’s grain. Scoring against the grain results in broken fibers. When you fold paper that has been scored against the grain, the fold can be rough.

This means, not only that you can fold paper either vertically or horizontally with the Scorit-it Board regardless of grain, but also that you can use the Scor-it tool to emboss nice borders or create raised lines to form part of your design.

Think about the possibilities.

How about inking or adding gold leaf to the raised lines? Earlier I mentioned that the Scor-it Board can create a hinge score across any angle of the paper’s grain.

If you’re into advanced card or bookmaking, that allows you to make twist cards, house cards, tea bag books, flower folds and rectangular-bottomed gift bags. [Learn how to do these projects in Alisa Golden’s Creating Handmade Books.]

Finally, the Scor-it Board can be used to score materials other than plain paper.

It will handle up to 24pt board stock. It will also score thin metal, plastic, metallic-coated paper, synthetic and hand-made paper. Use your imagination!

From all I’ve already said, you can tell the Scor-it Board is very versatile and very well designed.

Now, here’s the icing on the cake. The scoring tool is “leashed” to the board so that it’s always handy; and the leash can be attached from either the left or the right to accommodate lefties, righties or even two different-handed users. You can switch it, literally, in a snap.

Scor-It comes in various sizes to accomodate all sized projects.

Check out the Scor-it Board on their website and use the store locator to find out who carries it in your area. While you’re on the site, be sure to look at their other clever paper craft tools.

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