Ever since I saw a random YouTube video about embossing, I became intrigued with the idea. I love doing crafts with earthy materials like leather, wood, or metal. I don’t particularly like crafts made out of paper (because they look like trash to me), although I sometimes do those with my kids because they love it so much. So when I ordered a roll of copper sheeting, I was excited to get started. Well, my first attempt at embossing was a failure. It just didn’t look right. I was expecting it to be spectacular, and my expectations were way off base. It’s just thin metal with grooves in it, after all.
Well, this time I tried making embossed Christmas ornaments. I went to a local craft supply store and got a box of 6 metal sheets. (The box is called “Metal Art,” and it cost me $12.99. It had a picture of metal sheets with a pattern of holes in them, like a design. It included a mallet that I never used.) Anyway, I realized that in my Play Doh supplies, I had some cheap plastic sculpting tools. So I grabbed one of those to make the grooves this time, instead of a ballpoint pen. The embossing sheets were thinner, so it was easier to make the grooves. I think the pen actually gave me more contro
l over the drawing than the sculpting tool did, so I recommend the pen after all. Except that you need the sculpting tool to puff out the lines on the other side, by going over the lines (beside the lines) to accentuate the lines. Just look at the YouTube video or my previous blog entry about embossing to give instructions on how to do it. Then we cut out the design and pierced a hole through it with an ornament hanger. It looked okay on the tree, I guess.
The silver-colored sheeting looks particularly bad, because it looks like you just put up some crumpled foil on the tree. So do I recommend this? Sort of. It was not until I did the star ornament that I truly thought it looked good, and even though I didn’t gl
ue it to velvet cardboard, that would have looked a lot better, because it would have given the ornament more substance. So, yes, you can make a professional, great-looking ornament if you have some black velvet cardboard to glue it to. I didn’t have the money to buy everything in the YouTube video, so I tried to made do with what I had.
Then it occurred to me that the sheet was thin enough for a bookmark. So my children made bookmarks with it. That was fun and actually looked good. So thumbs up for bookmarks with embossed metal! I wonder what else I can make with it?
A woman I went to boarding school with in Guatemala told me how she made Transformer cookies with her sons, and what a success it was. She just used a gingerbread man cookie cutter and squared off the head, arms, and feet. I thought that was a great idea, so we made them.
We added more details with black icing gel, which you can get at a regular grocery store. You could also add M+M’s and other candy for the buttons of each robot. The finished Transformer cookies looked good enough to eat!
