Scent Embossed Gingerbread Cookie Cards

I started this last week after seeing this tutorial on Papertrey Ink's Capture the Moment blog for making your own scented embossing powder.  I remembered this cute recipe book cover on the Lawn Fawn blog from last Christmas with a design I wanted to reproduce.  I actually bought the stamp set they were profiling because I liked that cover so much.

So, first I needed my spices.  I mixed the spices used for gingerbread cookies, which turned out to be too strong for what I wanted and didn't quite smell like gingerbread.  The tutorial for this technique emphasized not adding sugar (because it will burn when you heat the powder), and I imagine that and molasses help give the traditional scent.  I messed with the powder, adding some more ginger, etc, until I liked what I ended up with well enough.  I then use 1 tsp of my spice mix and combined it with 1* tsp clear embossing powder in a small container I got at the dollar store.
[* After looking at the tutorial post again, it's supposed to be 2 tsp embossing powder to 1 tsp spice/scent, which is probably why I had issues if I used too much powder at once.  Having said that, the 1-1 ratio did work, just probably not as well as the 1-2 I was supposed to use.]

Now, my gingerbread cookie stamps aren't solid, so this was the perfect excuse for me to pull out the Versamark pen I bought years ago and never used.

I started the cookies by stamping a bunch in white pigment ink and another set in black dye ink.  I wasn't sure which I'd prefer, so decided to do both.  After the pigment ink had dried, I went over the faces of the figures with the Versamark pen, and then added the embossing powder on top.  I did 3-4 at a time (and found that 4 was pushing it, as the 4th ones turned out spotty) and tapped off the excess powder.   Then I heated the 3-4 designs before shaking my powder to keep it properly mixed and moving on to the next group.

Here, you can see a few embossed.  The cardstock looks darker (due to the spices in the embossing powder).  Here's a close-up.  You can see how the embossing makes the cookies look a bit rough.  And if you scratch them a bit, they smell!

Fussy cutting them all out took a decent amount of time, but they look great.  I added a few gel pen accents to the arms/legs/hem and tree.

The final step, which I did today, was to cut out the cookie trays with my Silhouette SD and assemble the cards.  I also cut out a slightly smaller tray out of acetate, which I used to help me white gel pen a line around the pan.

I did two cards, trying out slightly different designs.  For the first card I added a strip of glitter ribbon above the stamped sentiment.  I attached the cookies using pop-dots.

For the second card, I added a contrasting panel, which allowed me to wrap some twine around the card.  I'm submitting this card to this week's Simon Says Stamp's embossing challenge.