Making Grungy Butterflies into Enamel Pieces

November 26, 2019

Hi again sweet Rubber Dance friends. Ingunn here with my second post as this month's Guest Designer. For the last month I have been almost obsessed with ultra thick embossing powder, or UTEE. This is my first attempt to work on a canvas, but these butterflies are to heavy to go on a card. For the background to make the textured columns I used pieces from a silk blouse with sequins and ribbons. I also used acrylic paints, Gesso and texture paste. I have used Grungy Butterfly #4, Mix A Sentiment #1, Grungy Borders and Grungy Stuff.

What I wanted to achieve was to make the butterflies into an "enamel jewelry piece". This is one way to do it with a regular heat gun. (its messy, but totally fun)

You need a box to put the UTEE in and a heat resistant one to do the melting in if you want minimum mess. Then you need your stamped images ready colored and embossed, and an embossing pad.

Start by pressing your stamped image on your watermark pad.

Put it in the UTEE and make sure it is well covered.

Start heating until it is all melted. Then put it quickly straight back in the UTEE. If it does not stick all over, just heat what`s on it and let it cool for a second, then use the embossing pad to add glue and repeat til you are satisfied. 3 times will give a smooth coverage.

I really wanted my butterflies to make an impact and used 6 dips! This was the first I made. You can see that the embossing has "bled" a little, but they are thick and glossy and look like the enamel jewelry I remember admiring as a kid :)

I turned my living room into a lab, and did some research into what embossing powder to use with UTEE, and other methods to make an enamel effect. White embossing powder takes the heat well, all others bleed and the metallic ones get ugly!! Glossy accents gives a smooth and glossy surface, but very thin. The big discovery was that pouring fluid also gives a thin glossy surface, but it actually works as a heat resist too! So if used on top of embossing the embossing survive the heat applied using UTEE:)

Here are two cards I made with with the other mediums. The green one is with Glossy accents and the yellow one is with silver embossing and a layer of pouring fluid. Joy is cut from Enjoy The Season from Four Seasons and the small circles are from the same set. The borders are from Doodle Borders #1.