September 11, 2013

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.

4 comments:

Karen Letchworth said...

This is DARLING, Jessica. You've got me in the mood to start some Christmas baking. Thanks for sharing this festive and adorable card. I'm SO glad I found your sweet blog. Your cards are just DARLING! I'd like to invite you to stop by and play along in our weekly challenges at Word Art Wednesday. Our challenges are ALWAYS Anything Goes (family friendly) and you can enter up to 5 times each week for the chance to win amazing prizes (we have such AWESOME sponsors). I'd absolutely LOVE having you share your sweet cards and projects with us, and I really hope to see you soon. Please stop by and check us out!
Blessings,
Karen Letchworth, Blog Owner
Word Art Wednesday

Patty said...

Scratch and sniff cards! That is so neat! :D

cheiron said...

YUM! These look good enough to eat. Thanks for playing along with the Emboss It Challenge over at the Simon Says Stamp Wednesday Challenge Blog this week!

Karin said...

Nice cards, Jess!