The other day, I found a plain wooden plaque at Michael’s for $2 and thought it would look great with a gold silhouette on it. Originally, I had planned on gold leafing it but I decided at the last minute to go with heat embossing. If you haven’t tried heat embossing before…it’s magical. Truly. I used to demo the embossing process at my work and nearly everyone would walk away with the heat embossing set (including me). It’s that fun.

Heat embossing is normally used for stamping. It makes stamps become shiny, upraised and beautiful. I love using it for greeting cards and it came in handy with those DIY gift tags over the holidays. I’ll do a stamp tutorial soon, but let’s jump the gun and experiment today.

Supplies needed:
Wooden plaque (or a piece of wood, canvas, anything really)
Cardstock
Painter’s tape (or any tape, really)
Embossing Powder – I always pick gold!
Embossing Heat Tool
Versamark Watermark Stamp Pad
Optional Glitter Tray

First, choose your silhouette. I found mine here. Just search “free _____ silhouette” and you’ll get a lot of options. I tried to find something without too much detail. Print your silhouette out onto your cardstock paper. Carefully cut out the silhouette so that you have a stencil. Then, tape it to the wooden plaque or whatever type of surface you are using. The wonderful thing about heat embossing is that it works on so many different kinds of surfaces – paper, cloth, wood, etc.

Carefully, stamp the entire cut-out area using a Versamark Watermark Stamp Pad.

Next, remove the tape and stencil and cover the silhouette with your embossing powder. Funnel the remaining powder back into the jar. After pouring all of my powder out of the jar, I felt like I would lose at least half of it to the bunny. But when I poured it back into the jar (thank goodness for that glitter tray!), I hardly noticed a difference. Embossing powder goes a really long way.