Last Month's Stampin' Success Contest Winners have been announced and . . .

. . . no free stamps for me. I'm not discouraged, though. Even though my cards didn't win the contests, they can still pop up on display boards or on Stampers' showcase, and I'm glad I finally entered a contest to begin with. Right now I really should be working on next month's contest entries, but I'm kind of stuck for ideas. But the September contests, which were just announced today, look pretty cool, so I'm sure I'll be entering those. The hope of winning free stamps springs eternal, I guess.

Anyway, I promised to tell you about my new not-so-exciting technique regardless of what happened, so here it it. Now, this card may look familiar. In fact, you saw its previous incarnation in this post. And I know what you're thinking -- there's nothing new here. But if you look closely there was one change. The original card used organdy ribbon and silver cord. Well, that looked really pretty, but both were retired on June 30. I really liked the card and wanted to make it again, but I needed a suitable substitution for the cord (the new taffeta ribbon would do nicely as a substitute for the organdy, although my order for the ribbon had not yet arrived when I made this card). Well, the closes thing I had was hemp twine, but that was not nearly elegant enough. So I started thinking how I could make it elegant, which, of course, led me to embossing. So I embossed the twine. Nope, I'm not kidding. I first ran it through the encore silver ink pad so that an entire length of cord was covered and then poured silver embossing powder over the cord and heat embossed the whole thing. And it worked! And here is the finished product, with the embossed cord used to hold the chipboard faux metal charm on the card.

Of course, a few days after I came up with this Stampin' Up! announced that stretchy silver cord would be available in the holiday mini, so I'm guessing I'll be using that for my elegant projects because it is much easier than embossing a bunch of twine. But the dyed and embossed twine idea is not limited to silver embossing. With a little pigment ink and iridescent ice powder you can now emboss yourself a glittery strand of twine (at least in theory -- I haven't actually tried it). Plus, now I know that pigment ink can be used to dye the twine, so I have twine available in as many colors as I have of craft ink. I will say that he reason I embossed the twine in the first place was that the silver encore ink would not set by itself, even when I used the heat tool. I haven;t tried Stampin' up! craft ink yet, so I'm not sure if dyeing alone will do the job or if I will have to emboss the twine with clear EP, but either way, it's neat to have a bunch of new twine possibilities!