Happy Tuesday! I always look for fun ways to maximize the products to get more bang for my buck. When I got this Ornate Gate Die from Top Dog Dies, I immediately fell in love. Colored cardstocks, patterned papers, vellum, or even glitter paper would be perfect to use it with this delicate die. However, for this project, I decided to twist things up a bit. Yup, I am “stamping” with the die!
It might sound crazy, but it totally works. Fear not – I have a step by step instruction right here for ya:
– Secure the die by putting it down on a work surface with a double sided tape. I just used my snail adhesive for this – anything would work.
– Take any ink pad of choice and ink the die up. You DO NOT want to press it down too hard, because you only want to touch the “raised” side of the die (where it usually cuts paper). I decided to emboss mine so I am using Versamark Ink Pad here.
– Take a piece of cardstock you want to stamp the image on. I am using Distress Watercolor Paper. Before stamping, secure each side of the paper with a scotch tape. This will help the paper not move around while you rub the paper on top of the die to get the impression.
– Put the paper right on top of the die, making sure that is where you want. You might want to practice couple times but having a grid map helps. Secure the scotch tapes and then rub the paper all over to get a good impression. Lift the paper up slowly and nicely. You will see the stamped image!
I heat embossed my image with a white embossing powder. Then I watercolored the whole card front to create the emboss resist watercolor look. No complicated technique here, just went in with different colors to pop out the detailed image of the die.
Simple and small sentiment is a perfect way to go when you want to pop out the whole card – especially if you worked so hard to stamp with the die 🙂 I just kept it super simple, letting the rest of the card to speak. Take out a die you have and give this technique a try. It is fun and easy!