So, on the jewelry page I just made, I punched out a bunch of circles with some thumb punches, and one of the papers I used was pretty thick, so my thumb started hurting.
So I took a short length of dowel and put that on top of the punch and used that to push down with both hands. But then my hands were slipping so I wrapped a piece of duct tape around the stick. But then, a few times the punch slipped and whizzed across the room as the stick banged into the table, so then I put the punch on a piece of that spongy shelf lining stuff, and after that everything worked great.