Hi everyone! Welcome to another Tuesday on the Lotus Paperie blog and this week’s Tuesday Tutorial! With the new year well underway by now and most of the kids back at school, even us scrapping moms will be able to have hopefully a little bit more time on our hands to get just that little bit more creative with our scrap supplies, and today I’m going to show you how to heat emboss on acrylic.
Many of the scrapbook suppliers have over the past year released clear acrylic albums which are all the rage nowadays. However, due to their see-through nature, embellishing them requires a somewhat careful placement of paper, photos and embellishments, and after a while, there are only so many ways of doing this. Heat embossing the acrylic pages with various coloured embossing powders creates a different effect on the clear acrylic background and can give a different look to the album altogether. How is this done?
First, gather your materials. You will need the clear acrylic albums page , your embossing ink (I used Versamark), embossing powder (I used clear holographic), a heat gun, and, if you have one, a tray to catch the embossing powder.
Lay the acrylic page on a craft sheet to protect your worktable. Gently peel the protective film off one side of the acrylic sheet only, exposing the surface to be embossed.
Using the Versamark/embossing ink, ink the exposed surface of the acrylic sheet. How you ink it depends on how you want the final product to look. If you intend to cover the entire page, then sweep your ink pad across the surface. It does not have to be even, but do avoid leaving patches, unless a patchy effect is what you are going for. In my case, my intention was to emboss around the sides of the page, leaving the center clear. I therefore swiped my inkpad face down over the page , starting from about 1” from the edge and covering evenly.
When you’ve completed inking the page, place it face up in the tray. (If you don’t have one, just use a sheet of rough paper to catch the extra embossing powder.) Sprinkle the embossing powder over the inked portions of your page.
When the entire page is covered, gently lift it off the tray and place it on your craft sheet. (Again, if you don’t have a tray, just lift the sheet off your working sheet of paper and place it on another clean sheet of paper.) Using your heat gun, apply heat to the embossing powder until it melts and adheres to the acrylic surface. Depending on the size and thickness of your acrylic sheet, some acrylic sheets may soften and bend slightly but do not be alarmed, place them flat to cool and you will find that they do revert back to the original after cooling. Do avoid holding the heat gun in place over any one spot for too long as that may cause the acrylic to over soften. Do watch your embossing powder and once you see signs of it beginning to melt, move the heat gun to another spot, working in this manner until all the powder has melted.
And voila! You have your finished product, an acrylic sheet embossed with the embossing powder of your choice. Peel off the protective film of the other side of the sheet and you will have one textured side and one glossy side, with both showing the glitter/shine of the embossing powder you used. Do note that you can even choose to stamp images using your clear/rubber stamps, and for the more ambitious, even try to achieve a stained glass effect with different coloured embossing powders. As can be seen from the finished sheet which I’ve held up to the light, it truly has a lovely translucent textured effect which will make your acrylic album very unique indeed.
Below are a couple of examples showing the cover page (both sides) of an acrylic album which I covered with embossing powder and heated, as well as a page where I stamped swirl images and heat embossed them, and defined them with Perfect Pearls.
And so that’s it from me today, this is Carol, signing off. Hope you have enjoyed this week’s tutorial, and I wanna see all your works posted in our Flickr page! Have a good rest of the week, and do remember to tune in again on Friday for our challenge of the week!
I've decided to whip out my Perfect Pearls and show you a few techniques I like. I did these with my girls watching, they were really diggin' these techniques and want to try some themselves. :)
#1. Ink up your tag (paper) with Distress Ink. It need to be distress ink because the ink reacts to water, you will not get the extra ring of colour using a different type of ink. 
#1. Apply mask and cover entire tag/paper with clear embossing or versamark ink.
#1. Supplies... stamp, embossing powder, clear embossing ink, heat gun, perfect pearls, water, brush and paper.
#1. Mix perfect pearls with some clear embossing powder. The more perfect pearls you mix the less raised your image will be. The image will be more shimmery though. Stamp your image with clear embossing ink and sprinkle the mixture over top. Shake the excess off. Don't worry about your Perfect Pearls shimmering all over the paper for now. Your image should look like #2. Heat emboss with heat gun and use a brush to brush off the perfect pearls that are all over your paper, final result should be something like #3.
You can see more of this album here. Just scroll down.
Grab your broad stamp (in this instance, I am using my alpha stamp). Carefully press straight down onto the inked surface of the patterned stamp, taking care to not let the alpha stamp slide. 
Lift the stamp up and stamp onto your paper. With your craft knife, begin trimming around the letters, starting with the holes in the centers of each letter. It's easier to do this now rather than when the outside edges are already cut (you risk ripping the letters otherwise) Once they're cut out, just use them just like you would any other alpha!
Please don't steal our work. If you'd like to use it, just ask us. We're pretty nice and we'll probably say yes. It's super hard work making all this stuff and we'd like it if you asked us before using it.
