A neat little trick

In my card show-off post yesterday, the recipe for the card includes silver brads and pearl embossing powder. I was tipped off by another poster on SCS that embossing is a really good way to change the look of the same ol' plain boring brads that you have sitting around. If you're like me, you may have purchased a pack of 100+ brads when your project only called for a few, and are now sick and tired of using the same colour on your projects. Well, here's something you can do! I even took pics, for those who are visual in nature.

First, collect your supples. You will need brads (obviously!), a heat gun, embossing powder, clear embossing ink and tweezers. I recommend a pad like VersaMark for your ink. The bingo-dauber style is a lot harder to use on the teeny brad heads.

Pick up a brad with your tweezers, and press the head into the embossing ink. I tried to only get it on the head, since the prongs are hidden anyway.

Next, dip it in embossing powder. Tap off the excess.

Finally, heat that baby up! If one coat isn't enough, repeat the ink-powder-heat steps again. If you're fast enough off the heat, you might be able to just dip it straight back into the powder and skip the ink. Be careful to let the brad cool for 15 seconds or more before touching - it's HOT! And the powder doesn't dry as fast as it does on paper, so you may fingerprint it. If you do smudge or fingerprint the melted embossing powder, just heat it again and it'll smooth over.

If you want to do sparkly glitter brads, the glitter embossing powder is just the solution! You may wish to do a coat of a metallic or pearly powder before you do the glitter coat(s), as many glitter powders are transparent and don't have the same coverage as a regular full-coverage powder.

Here are my sample brads. All four started out as plain silver. From left to right, they are covered in: gold powder, copper powder, white pearl powder + kaleidescope glitter powder, white pearl powder + silver glitter powder.

As you can see, they don't have the same super-shiny finish as a metal brad does, but it looks pretty cool regardless. The photos don't really do justice to how nice they really look on a card!