Hi friends! Happy Sunday and please welcome back our dear friend and designer extraordinaire, Debby Hughes!

Hi, this is Debby here and today for my Doodling With Debby feature for Simon Says Stamp I’m creating this simple white heat embossed background pattern. I love the clean and simple white embossing on the dusky blue, and it should have been relatively straightforward to complete, but I often find I mess up on backgrounds such as this and in the video, I included my mistakes and also how I fixed them.

The stamp set I’ll be using today is called Moments Of Grace and is a lovely set from Simon Says Stamp with beautifully scripted sentiments and elegant line-drawn flora. I white heat embossed the flowers and leaves on a blue background. You could use a blue card, but my preference for a colored card is to create my own from my ink pads. I have a wide array of ink pad colors, and I often prefer the softer more muted shades you get from blending the inks onto white card. I like to use Neenah Solar White in the 80lb version and find I get good smooth blends when using this card. I used a Picket Fence Blending Brush to get a lovely smooth blend with my favorite Cloudy Sky ink from Simon Says Stamp. So, using light circles with the brush, I blended the ink over the card until I had fully covered it. Once I was happy with the coverage, I then dried the panel with a heat tool. As the ink dries, it lightens in color, and any imperfections tend to smooth out too. It was also important to dry the card before moving on to the embossing section as embossing powder will stick to any damp areas, and you won’t get the clean embossed look which helps with a simple style such as this.

I placed the ink-blended panel in the Misti and held it in place with magnets before rubbing with an anti-static powder bag. The powder from this bag will hopefully prevent stray embossing powder sticking everywhere. I took the Moments of Grace stamp set and using the five floral images I arranged them in the top corner of the card. I stamped the images in Simon Says Stamp clear embossing ink and then sprinkled Simon Says Stamp white embossing powder over the sticky ink. I tapped off any excess and then tidied up with a dry paintbrush to sweep away any stay granules. I heat set the powder with a pre-heated heat tool.

I repeated this process as I worked on covering the whole of the panel of ink blended card. All was going well, as a whole my embossing was quite clean with minimal stray powder. If I had any trouble anywhere, it was with the edges of the ink-blended panel where the ink was perhaps still a bit damp, but I kept tidying up with my brush and was happy as I continued stamping the five images over the panel. However, by now I’d really been using a lot of the anti-static powder bag over everywhere and I think I’d got a lot over the stamps too which were getting a bit dry and not sticking to the door of the Misti as well as before and all of a sudden, an inky stamp fell onto the card. I hoped the ink hadn’t transferred, but when I realigned the images, stamped them and sprinkled with embossing powder, I was left with embossing powder everywhere. I decided to sweep away the mess with my dry brush, add lots more powder and try and align the stamp exactly where it was before, but I failed and ended up with a weird double stamped image. So, instead, I decided to cut my losses and trim the panel down to omit the end of the panel. Fortunately, this accident happened on the last edge, and I started with a piece of card slightly bigger than I likely needed and so by trimming the panel down I was able to rescue the embossing I had done.

I wanted the embossed pattern to be the main focus of the card, and so I chose one of the lovely scripted sentiments from the Moments Of Grace set to emboss on a strip of vellum. I love the translucency of vellum, and when white heat embossed and cut to a strip the sentiment can still be read, but it doesn’t dominate. I wrapped the vellum strip around the panel and secured on the back of the card with tape. I then further secured the vellum when adding foam adhesive to the back of the panel and then adding to a white side folding card base cut and scored from Neenah Solar White card in the 110lb weight. As you can see, the panel has a wider border around the edges having trimmed it down more than I usually would, but I still love the look of it, and it just adds a slightly different style.

Back to the embossing and I guess it wasn’t unexpected that with the amount of embossing, this panel would have a few stray granules here and there. However, these are easy to remove I find by scraping lightly with a scalpel. So, that removed any excess embossing, and then for the areas where the embossing had missed a bit, I fixed that with a white gel pen and looking at it afterward no one would know! So this panel was a case of fixing my mistakes from trimming it down to omit the blooper and then to tidy up with a scalpel and white gel pen. To finish off the card I sprinkled around a liberal dose of white and clear sequins in various sizes from the Girl’s Best Friend sequin mix from Simon Says Stamp which I kept in place with Gina K Connect glue.

Thanks for joining me today, and I’ll see you next time for Doodling With Debby.

WATCH THE VIDEO:

Watch below or in HD on YouTube.

SUPPLIES:

Simon Says Clear Stamps MOMENTS OF… [ SSS ] Simon Says Stamp Premium Dye Ink Pad… [ SSS ] Simon Says Stamp Embossing Ink Pad… [ SSS ] Simon Says Stamp EMBOSSING POWDER… [ SSS ] Neenah Classic Crest 80 LB SMOOTH… [ SSS ] Neenah Classic Crest 110 LB SMOOTH… [ SSS ] Simon Says Stamp VELLUM SSSVEL12 [ SSS ] Crafter’s Companion HEAT RESISTANT… [ SSS ] Simon Says Stamp Sequins GIRL’S BEST… [ SSS ] Gina K Designs CONNECT GLUE Adhesive… [ SSS ] 3M Scotch DOUBLE-SIDED FOAM TAPE… [ SSS ] Uni-Ball Pen Signo Gel WHITE UM-153 [ SSS ] Ranger ANTI-STATIC POUCH ink62332 [ SSS ] Picket Fence Studios LIFE CHANGING… [ SSS ]

Thanks so much for stopping by, and to Debby for being our guest!