FOILING WITH DIES

FOILING WITH THIN CUTTING DIES

I have been enjoying the chance to play with a go press and foil machine, made by Couture Creations, who have a couple of very watchable videos on YouTube that will show you all the "how tos" if you are interested.

One of the appealing bits about the machine is that you can use thin metal dies as well as the specially made foiling dies.  The only thing to remember is that if you use them face up, the bit that will be foiled will be the raised cutting edges rather than the "solid" shape of the die, so its important to chose one that is appropriate and doesn't get "lost" through lack of detail.  This spider's web worked quite well - probably better than it did as a traditional die!

COLOURING WITH EMBOSSING POWDERS

COLOURING WITH EMBOSSING POWDERS

I don't think that I'll do much of this as I was a bit underwhelmed with the result, however this might just be a function of lack of practice so I probably should give it a few more tries before I give up.

I stamped and embossed the fish with black powder, then used a versamark pen to colour in the silver bits of the fish, then the copper, gold and white in turn, heating between each addition, and finally covered the brown background with clear embossing powder.

You can see on the back that the silver powder is "overcooked" and patchy, whilst he white powder has "escaped" its borders, spreading more that the copper and gold which, if anything, seemed to shrink when heated.

If I try this technique again, I think I'll try just heating the powders until they are stuck in place until the final layer to try to avoid the overheating issue, and I might also choose a design that's larger so that I can space out  the embossed areas a bit between heating,  A sensible person would also do a little trial to determine the properties of each of the different embossing powders before throwing them onto the main project!

Still....it kind of looks OK, and is quite nicely raised and textured (even if the latter is not quite in the "supposed to be" category) so I've probably talked myself into trying again during the course of writing this entry!