Sweet Stamp Shop: Sketches 2 Ways

Good morning everyone!  It's my day over at the Sweet Stamp Shop blog and I hope you'll go check out my post, if you haven't already, to see the sneak peek at this week's CTS challenge and two takes on the sketch.  I had a blast with them and I'm going to show you how I stamped in my embossing powder to create my deer's look on the Father's Day card you can see here.

I'm going to show you the technique but I'm going to do it on the back of the card using Handcrafted so you get a bit of a bonus today...two cards and a card back! 

Here's a look at the finished back:

To get my "crafted by" to have a wax seal look, this is what I used:  my trusty stamp set, versamark, gold embossing powder, and my heat gun, of course!

I flipped my stamp over to stamp the back of the stamp in versamark.  Luckily, with clear stamps, both sides stick to an acrylic block.  This is also a great way to get a watercolor look behind a stamp image.  I'll have to do that another time and show you what I mean.  For now, we are using it to make a similarly shaped area of embossing to stamp into.

I covered my stamped image with my embossing powder and was ready to heat it.  Keep your embossing powder close because you are going to move fairly fast for the next step.

After you melt the embossing powder, you are going to want to shake on more embossing powder into the still wet layer before.  You will continue doing this until you have a fairly thick puddle of embossing.  You will have some stray embossing powder because it likes to stick to the warm cardstock area.  I actually like the look it leaves behind.  The above image shows one layer and you can see how much neater it is than the later layers.  In all I did 5 layers.

When you have melted your last layer, you are going to want to quickly stamp your image into the still wet embossing powder.  It makes a very satisfying sticky sound when you remove it.  ;)

I took it a step further and decided to see if I could get an aged gold look by stamping some black ink back into my depressed image.  I didn't want it too dark so after I inked up my image, I stamped it off once before stamping it into the embossing powder.

I like how the addition of the black really makes the image pop.  I didn't add my gold foil to the back of this card until after all the heating was finished.  I've noticed that heat and gold foil don't play well together.

I hope you enjoyed my little step by step today and I really hope you will go visit me on the Sweet Stamp Shop blog!  Thanks for stopping by.