Embossing is a wonderful technique because it makes even simple rubber stamps look beautiful. You can add color and texture to your designs, draw focus to one part of your design and make the project look fancy and irresistibly touchable.
With just some basic materials, you can create many different effects on your layouts or cards.
To start, you will need the following supplies (refer to pages 65/66 of the Kaszazz Catalogue).
- Heat Gun (a good quality, high wattage gun is recommended)
- Embossing Ink - Perfect Medium inkpad, Pigment inkpad or Top Boss Inkpad (clear or tinted)
- Embossing Powder
- Stamps – rubber is best (optional)
- Perfect Medium Pens (optional)
- Metal Oven Tray or Tweezers to hold your work (optional)
- Anti-static Pillow (optional)
Embossing Powders- Embossing powders are surprisingly economical. Kaszazz have a range of powders including basic solid colors, metallics, pearls, opalescent and clear. So clearly this simple technique will provide a bunch of great opportunities to alter your designs.
Here’s What To Do…
1. First wipe the area to be stamped with an anti-static pillow. This step is optional, but is a good idea if you want to make sure no stray embossing powder granules are on the surface surrounding the image. Particularly necessary when embossing on dark backgrounds. Anti-static products reduce static on the paper, which attracts embossing powder granules. The powder can even stick to your fingerprints!
2. Next ink your stamp with your embossing ink pad or pigment ink of choice, and place the stamp down on your paper. In order to heat emboss, you must use an ink that dries slowly, which is why embossing ink, Crafter’s or ColorBox pigment inks are used. Dye or fluid chalk inks dry too quickly for this process. If you want to have a totally transparent embossing effect, use clear embossing ink, not tinted. The tinted ink will show through. Tinted is good to use on light coloured backgrounds so you can see what you are embossing. If you use different color pigment inks remember that your image will be the color of your embossing powder not the ink you used.
3. Using scrap paper on the table underneath your work, generously sprinkle your embossing powder over the image. Tip off the powder onto your scrap paper underneath. Tap the back of your paper several times to release the powder and if there are some granules in areas that you don’t want, use a small soft paintbrush to dust them away. Carefully pour the unused powder back into the container.
4. Using your heat gun, heat the image until the powder melts and turns shiny. Hold your heat gun about 6 inches from the paper. After about 20 seconds you will notice the embossing powder melting. Melted embossing powder is smooth and shiny, and has a raised edge. Remember that if you heat too close to the cardstock, you can cause the embossing powder or the paper itself to burn. For smaller pieces of paper, use tweezers or an oven tray to hold your embossing so that you don’t burn your fingers. If you don’t have a heat gun but still want to try out embossing, turn your toaster to the darkest setting and push down the handle so it starts to heat. Hold the card (with the stamped side up) over the toaster, being careful to make sure the whole image gets heated and that you don’t scorch the page. Hair dryers are not effective because they don’t get hot enough.
Fixing Mistakes in your Embossing
Sometimes a small portion of your design won’t stamp or emboss properly. Perfect Medium Pens can be used to draw in a missing part of the design so you can re-emboss that section. Alternatively, you can use a pen such as a Gel Pen or other acid-free Pen to fix it up afterwards.
So there you have it! The basics of heat embossing! But how can you use heat embossing in your scrapbooks? Here are just some of the techniques you can apply:
Emboss images on your Scrapbook pages.Just stamp an image on your page and emboss. You can also use a Perfect Medium pen to highlight an existing image on your paper and then emboss.
Random Embossing. Swipe your ink pad over your paper and just emboss an area on your layout.
Change the color of metal embellishments. For instance, if you run out of a gold brad, you can easily change a silver brad to gold by using gold embossing powder. Holding the brad with tweezers, heat the top and then dip into the embossing powder. Heat again until the embossing powder is melted.
Emboss transparencies. Type a title or phrase out on a transparency and as soon as it comes out of the printer, sprinkle embossing powder over it. Carefully heat the title, making sure not to warp the transparency. The best way to do this is to have a piece of cardboard wrapped in aluminum foil.
Place the transparency on that surface while heating in order to speed up the heating process before the transparency has a chance to warp. This technique also works with vellum.
Make Pigment Inks Permanent - If you want to use pigment ink on glossy card, or make it permanent to use with watercolour paints, you will have to emboss it with Clear Embossing Powder because otherwise the ink will smear with the water.
Embossing Resist Technique - Stamp onto glossy card with Perfect Medium and emboss. Then apply ink over your work. The ink will resist the stamped area.
