Embossing Powder and Ink Review

Hi everyone. Today is Friday and that means another blog post.

A few weeks back we did a review on the new heating tool that we bought and this week we thought that we would do another review on embossing power and ink. As most crafters know, everything looks crisper and polished when you use embossing powder and even if you choose not to, it’s always best to heat your ink to make it set and not smudge. 

Embossing Powder:

We choose to use Recollections brand embossing powder for our work. It makes the finished product looks so much better and professionally done. The powder comes in a little plastic container with a twist on lid so it’s easy to pour over both large and small pieces of stamped work. We stamp our image, then cover it with embossing powder over a plain piece of white paper and then shake off the excess powder onto the white sheet. After that, we pour the powder back into it’s container and have lots to use for next time. This embossing powder comes in a good size container so it lasts a long time since only a thin layer sticks to the ink and we are very careful about pouring the leftovers back into the container.

Embossing powder comes in all sorts of colors. We have silver, clear, white, gold, and sparkly. When using clear embossing powder, after it’s heated the the stamped image will show up in whatever color you stamped in.       

As you will see, after you’ve heated your embossed work, the paper will curl so just remember to flatten it out under some books or some heavy flat objects.

When using colored embossing power, no matter what color you stamp in, the heated image will be the color of the embossing powder that you used. We use silver ink along with silver embossing powder when we want a silver image. 

However sometimes you don’t have the right color ink but want a certain colored image/words, so you stamp in a different color. It’s best to use a similar color to the color that you want if you have one. For example, we stamp in a light yellow parchment color when we use white embossing powder because you can’t see that shade through the powder. When we want gold words/images we stamp in black and then cover it in gold embossing powder. 

Ink: 

 

We’ve been talking throughout this post about ink. Ink is a very important part of stamping and our card making. We use the ColorBox brand. We have a few of the eight color Petal Points and a few of the one color ink pads. I’m the stamper of this business and I think that this ink is great for the most part. The single color ink pads are very inky and can be used for quite some time. They come in lots of different shades so you have lots of options to choose from. The Petal Points are pretty good too. They’re a good idea if you want to sample colors or if you want variety and don’t want to buy a bunch of single ink pads. Some colors in these packs are more inky than others and have lasted longer. I have noticed that the pastel and earth toned Petal Points are more inky than the primary one for some reason.

So there you have it, my views on ink and embossing powder. They’re both crucial elements of paper crafting so try out these brands and see what you think of them.

Happy weekend,

Samantha