Like a lot of us at the moment with time on our hands, I've been having a bit of a craft room clear out. My box of discarded experiments and painty backgrounds needed a bit of a sort out. Something I like to do quite often is to take these backgrounds and cut them into ATC's. This gives me instant ATC bases to work with plus it usually makes me look at these discarded projects in a different way.


At the same time I also cut shapes from others, my go-to shape always being circles.


Using these circles I drew freehand doodle shapes with the Freestyle Embossing Tool with its lovely smooth roller ball top. I embossed over this with a mixture of Seth Apter's Metalz Trio powders.


I decided to cut a few stars as a complement to the circles already cut and used an offcut of black card to emboss the Metalz Trio's onto before cutting a selection of different sizes out. I like the effect of using a black background as it makes these powders even grungier.

I added the circles t…

Spring is my favourite season of the year. I love the fresh colours, the bright greens and the promise of warmer days outside.


I recently started a new planner for my garden to make notes of what I'm planting and changing. Of course this requires a dashboard for the new season and thought I'd include this beautiful piece of chipboard from Samantha K Gifts and Crafts on the front. I decided to cover it with embossing powders but rather than all one colour I thought I could mix it up a bit and create a multi coloured effect.


As the chipboard is dark, I first gave it a light coat of gesso to lighten the base. You need to dry brush it on almost so as not to clog up the little holes in the design. 


When this was dry I could brush Mixed Media Embossing fluid with the brush right where I wanted to add powder.


With the brush it's possible to emboss the smallest of areas.


I carried on adding fluid and powder all over the chipboard, leaving it to the end to heat set everything tog…

I know I'm a bit of a rebel and have been known on...let's say...more than one or two occasions, to go totally againsed the rules, but this time I think the results are worth it! At my workshops I'm always saying, the rules are there to be broken and for those of us with challenging and enquiring minds we can achieve some wonderful things.

On this occasion I was experimenting with layers of embossing powders and decided to push it as far as I could take it by over heating and blending powders into one another. One of the basic rules of heat embossing is to not over heat your work for fear of it splitting and separating out the oils and colours. Letting one colour melt into another is very satisfying indeed.

For this project I found that you really need a sturdy piece of plain card, watercolour or mixed media card is good otherwise it'll start to bend and buckle under the layers. I also discovered that to help me achieve a deeper first layer I could use a brand new Embo…