Make a blendMode permanent?

I have a Sprite with it’s blendMode set to “LAYER”, I’ll call this “paper”. I add a solid circle to the paper sprite with a blend mode of “ERASE” in order to make it look like the paper had a hole punched in it.

This works fine except when I start to add lots of holes, the performance slows down because I have many sprites layered on each other all effecting the paper beneath it (and probably each other as well if they overlap).

So is there a way to apply the blend mode so I can get rid of the hole after it effects the bitmap of the paper?

Thanks.