Fun with Dingbats

I wonder if anyone can guess what book I have just finished reading when I say that using both the positive and the negative of a die-cut gives so much scope for the imagination?  The same could equally be said for dingbat fonts.

Were you a scrapbooker way back in the day before we learnt to love our handwriting and all our journalling was done on the computer using fancy fonts.  I'm pretty sure the enticement of being able to download free fonts off the internet was one the key factors in finally getting the internet connected at our house!  I probably downloaded about a thousand, and regularly backed them up so that I could easily take them with me when we upgraded our computer.  Clever, hey?  But did I mention that I backed them up onto floppy disks? LOL. 

It was a good thought, but by then I was tending to do most of my journalling by hand.
My interest in fonts has revived somewhat of late, however, since I've had the Silhouette.  I downloaded some different script fonts from fontspace.com recently, and it occurred to me that some fun might be had with dingbat fonts.  On that one site alone, a search for the word "ding" comes up with 1,710 matches!

Here's two things I did with just one font: LogoSkate.

Idea 1: Dingbat font as patterned paper.

Couldn't be easier - I just filled a Word document with different characters to a size that roughly fitted the negative of the skateboarder shape!
This card also happens to be my card based on Michelle's sketch at her blog Scraposition for the Let's Scrap blog hop around the world. (I turned the sketch onto it's side and adjusted the elements a bit)

Idea 2: Dingbat as page accent.

For this page, I asked my son to pick 3 favourite skateboarding brands, printed them out at a largish font size (90 I think) with plenty of space around each one, then cut them out using a circle cutter!

PS What do you think of my banner? I've made a banner before with the Silhouette by cutting out a row of triangles, but then I thought of a quicker way . . . the strip at the top is of course hidden by the paper above it! If you've got a Silhouette, why don't you give it a go?