It's been a busy couple of months since my last post. I had my first day of Hochanda shows for over a year - yay! :) I had a lovely time showing everyone the joys of Cernit polymer clay and Efco's fabulous Texture Mats. And so far, my shoulder is holding up - yay again!
Anyhoo, tomorrow I will be back at the studios again and this time I will be sharing Metal Embossing with Hochanda viewers at 10am.
It's such a versatile craft as it can be used to create wall art, and other home decor projects as well as for card making and scrapbooking. You can create your own designs or use stencils and embossing folders and once embossed, you can colour the metal with a variety of media including glass/ceramic paints, alcohol inks, acrylics, Pébéo Prisme and Moon paints.
Coloured aluminium foils can be sanded back once embossed to create distressed or two tone effects!
Here's the instructions for how to create the card above...
1. Diecut a piece of coloured aluminium foil.
2. Place the foil face down on the acrylic sheet and lay your stencil over the top, fixing it in position with a piece of low tack tape. Trace around the edges of each area of your design with a pointed teflon tool.
3. Flip the metal and stencil over and rub over the metal with the paper tool.
4. Still on the acrylic sheet, use the point of the paper tool to push out the areas of the design.
5. Use the pointed teflon tipped tool to trace around the edges of each area.
6. Flip the metal and stencil over to check that you have embossed every area completely.
7. Once you are happy with the embossing, gently sand the raised surface of the metal to remove the colour.
8. Fill the back with silicon glue to protect your embossing and to stick it to your card.
Of course you can just run the aluminium sheets through your die cutting machine as you would with card. It works beautifully with embossing folders as can be seen in the card below - the background was created using green foil and an Efco embossing folder and the flowers and leaves were diecut using a Spellbinder's die set, then coloured with alcohol inks before being embossed by hand.
There really is no end to the possibilities of what you can decorate with embossed metal - a bird box, a wooden box...
I hope that has given you a little inspiration and perhaps encouraged you to dip your toe in the art of metal embossing.
For more information check out the Creative Toobox YouTube channel. (The videos are in German but you can see how the various tools are used.)
Another great video which I'm sure will inspire you to create beautiful embossed pieces of art is by Metal Artist Elitia Hart - click here to view her Introduction to Metal Embossing YouTube Video.
Well that turned into a bit of a long post! I will be putting a couple of downloadable metal embossing project sheets onto the website in the next few days for those who prefer to be able to print out instructions.
Happy Crafting!
Fee x
