Weddingbee Blog

Following up on my last post about our invitations, I thought I would write a tutorial for those of you who want to learn more about heat-embossing your stamped images, which is a fun and affordable way to glam up your wedding stationery. Now, please note that I’m an amateur crafter and stamper, most of what I have learned is by trial and error, and I’m sure there are many people out there who can do this much better than I can.

With that in mind, here we go.

First, you will need to gather some basic supplies—cardstock or paper, your stamp of choice, ink, embossing powder, and some sort of heat tool.

You can either use coloured ink and clear embossing powder, or clear ink and coloured embossing powder, or both coloured ink and embossing powder (too many options!). We tried out all three ways, and found that when both were coloured (we used silver ink and silver embossing powder) the result was a more defined image.

For your heat source: we were lucky enough to have a heat tool specifically for embossing stamps, but you can also use a hairdryer on a low setting.

Now you’re ready to start. I would advise practicing on a scrap piece of card first, so you can get an idea of the process and how the stamp will look when finished:

1. Gently dab your stamp over the ink pad so it is evenly coated (but not too heavily, otherwise the ink may glob).
2. Position your stamp on the card as desired, and press down firmly and evenly so that all parts of the image are imprinted on the card. Don’t wiggle the stamp, otherwise the image will blur. Lift the stamp off carefully.
3. Before the ink dries (and some inks dry quite quickly!) pour embossing powder over the image, pick up the card and shuffle it a bit (if you know what I mean) so powder is distributed over every inky bit, then shake off excess powder onto a sheet of paper so you can re-use it for the next stamp. (You’ll be amazed at how little powder each stamp actually uses up).
4. Switch on your heat tool and gently blow in even “strokes” back and forth across the stamped image. It will seem like nothing is happening for a bit and then all of a sudden the texture will change to “melty” (ha, dont you like my technical terms?) and raised, and it is done. Yay!

Don’t worry if it doesn’t come out “perfect” the first few times—that is what trial runs are for! And the more you do it, the better you will get, and you will learn your own little techniques for getting it right.

The above are some of my trial and error attempts: If you look closely you can see that some of the ink smudged where it shouldn’t and on a couple of the images I didn’t leave the heat tool on long enough so the embossing powder didn’t fully melt.

But after a bit of practice you can come up with something like this:

Good luck, and happy stamping! I would love to hear about any stamping or embossing projects you have going on.

*All photos in this post credited to Mr E