The LOVE of Ornate Letters Make Me HAPPY!

I made a couple cards with the wonderful Simon Says Stamp Ornate Alphabet stamp/die set, the stamps released several releases ago, the dies just came out in the Diecember® release!  I love these letters, their possibilities are limitless!!   I made a card for Valentine's Day and one for a birthday...

I was in a metallic mood, and used a technique that I LOVE to color and emboss the letters for both my cards...one gold, the other silver.  You HAVE to have a MISTI to do this!  I put the stamps/letters in the MISTI, and stamped the letters with a gray ink, then colored the letters with markers. Below, is the beginning of the coloring the second of the three colors of ink I used on the letters (I used three different pinks).  

 I dried the inks with my heat tool to make SURE they were dry, then put the paper back in my MISTI so that the paper was put back in the MISTI the exact way they were taken out.  I brushed my embossing bag over the letters to make sure there was no static, and used versa mark on the stamps this time.  After stamping the colored letters, I sprinkled the gold embossing powder over the letters and heated.  I die cut then layered the letters, adhered to a layered stitched heart from the Simon Shimmer die, and added a gold die cut "you" from a Simon"miss you" die set.  Here's a close up...

The second one done just like the first in the way of technique, this time using only two colors of  color on each letter, for a birthday...

This time, I opted for silver on the letters!  Below, you see what each letter looked like after coloring, but before embossing...what a difference embossing makes...

I then cut a card panel and popped it up on the top and bottom of the "HAPPY", each having a silver strip.  I added a silver embossed "BIRTHDAY" below the happy...here's a close up...

Some might ask why do the embossing AFTER coloring??  Metallic embossing is not very forgiving when a marker touches it...the metallic changes to the color that touched it.  Now, if you had larger open spaces in your stamped image, it might be easier to get away with embossing then coloring, but I can pretty much guarantee that a marker will hit the embossed metallic at some point, and it will become colored. The look of pure silver or gold on top of the color is pretty cool, and not hard, as long as you have a MISTI!  The MISTI has really become a huge part of my stamping, not just for this kind of stamping, but for sentiment placement, and hard to stamp images that take more ink than one time stamping will provide, just to mention a couple examples...but examples that happen all...the...time!  Ok..."happy" to share my cards and insight with you today...having so much fun!!

Thanks for visiting me today!! Hugs!! Lisa