White Embossing

You don't always need to spend lots of time colouring stamped images to get a great looking card.  There are many different techniques we can use with our stamps that don't involve lots of tricky blending, colour selection, shading and highlighting and today I want to share one of my favourites with you. This technique uses heat embossing and a white pencil for a lovely soft look that resembles vellum. For that extra wow factor, I've used a base of shimmery green card that glimmers when the light hits it at certain angles.

I began by heat embossing onto the green card stock with white embossing powder. Don't forget to use an anti-static bag on your card stock before you begin. This will help prevent stray embossing powder from clinging in places you don't want it to be.

Next, I used a white pencil to highlight the different areas of the image. To get the look I wanted, I applied more pressure in the higher areas, such as the tips of the petals, and then gently and consistently released the pressure until the pencil faded away to nothing. You can see the transition on the petal below.

For extra interest, I heat embossed some of the individual flowers and a sentiment from the set onto a piece of vellum-like plastic that I have in my stash. You could do the same with a sheet of vellum, but just take care not to bring the heat gun too close or hold it in one spot for too long.

I used the coordinating dies to cut around the sentiment and individual flowers.

I wanted to add a little more depth to the design so I decided to adhere the additional flowers with foam tape. As the plastic is transparent, I took care to add little pieces of foam tape behind areas that had a lot of embossing, mostly the centres of each flower. The embossing camouflages the foam tape so it's not too noticeable from the front. 

The sentiment was adhered with both foam tape, in the very centre, and glue on either end to give it a kind of banner look. As the sentiment is heavy on embossing, there was no problem disguising the piece of foam tape.

Stamps and Dies