Since we can’t afford fancy letterpress invitations and because we’ll be diy-ing them ourselves, they’ll likely be offset printed on some kind of cardstock. So we need some visual interest and texture. I think we’re going to emboss some element of the invitation.

Of course I wanted to do a trial run-through, so I rounded up a trusty assistant and we got to work. My trusty assistant was my enthusiastic and supportive sister, Blue, of Pompous Apparel fame.

First, the supplies:

• Rubber stamp – $0.75 from the clearance bucket
• Pigment ink pad – $3.99
• Cardstock scraps – free, from an old project
• Heat tool for embossing – free, borrowed from a scrapbooking friend
• Embossing Powder – ~$5, I don’t remember exactly. But there’s probably enough of it to do at least half my invitations
  

  

After trial and error, here are the steps we suggest:

Stamp the cardstock with the ink in a randomish pattern.

Before the ink has a chance to dry dump a good amount of embossing powder over the ink until it’s completely covered. Give it a few seconds to adhere.

Dump the mounds of excess powder onto a holding sheet and move your cardstock to a clean sheet of paper.

Hold the the heat gun 2-3 inches from the paper, but keep it moving. If you leave it in one place to long, it could burn the paper. You’ll know when it’s done its duty in a particular area because the design will go from looking grainy and powdery to shiny and raised.

Rinse and Repeat.

Lesson’s Learned

• Make sure you use pigment ink. If you don’t, it doesn’t work.
• Use cardstock that is smooth, not textured. Our embossing powder got stuck in some of the crevices and we ended up with embossed texture in some places where we didn’t want it.
• The stamp looks kind of cool when its hanging off the edge of the paper. Like you meant it to be that way.
• Make sure you ink the stamp well and press it down hard every time. Otherwise you get an uneven print that you can’t go back and fix.

The Fruits of Our Labor

Why, bookmarks of course! Look close at the red one and you can see our errors that you should avoid.

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• Getting Things (MYSELF) In Order

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