Inked Embossing

Morning! 

Happy St. Patrick's day to you!  We did our celebrating on the weekend so today will be pretty tame so when you're out indulging in your green beer and Guinness, have one for me will ya? :)

Today I wanted to share a really cool technique I've tried.  It is such an amazing way to make your own bright, textured background paper.  This is another one I learned from the great Jennifer McGuire and if you'd like to check out the tutorial, you can do so here.  

The basic principal is to ink up the back side of your embossing folders so when you crank your sandwich through your machine, you come out with an inked, debossed surface!  Once done, you lightly apply another colour of ink to the raised surface to create a really great contrast.

I went ahead and tried this with a number of ink colours, but will say that I preferred the effects when using darker colours.  Another tip is to use your lighter colour for the debossed area and then your brighter colour for the raised areas.  

I wanted to give you a closer view so you can see it.  This is an imperfect technique in my opinion but I just love how I created an aged, distressed kind of look.  This was done on white card stock but I think i'll give this another go with some coloured card stock and a contrasting colour and see how it turns out.

This card is being entered into the following Challenges:

• Little Tangles: Challenge #54 - Anything Goes
• Virginia's View Challenge #13 - All Things Embossed
• Lawnscaping Challenge #102 - Distress Addicts

Please click the links above to learn more about these challenges and the wonderful folks who run them!

Well, that's it for now.  I'm just itching to get back to class (the OCC Stretch Your Dies Class that is!).  If you haven't heard of it, check out the link on the right.  I'm learning so much with such a great group of crafters.  I can hardly wait to see what today holds.

Wishing you hugs and Guinness until next time!