Embossing on vellum

I was not happy with my hot air, or heat gun, so I decided to invest in a new and more powerful one. I talked it over with my better half and he recommended buying an industrial brand that he has lots of experience using in his job. SO I did just that, and ended up buying a Steinel HL1920E. It has an output of 2000W compared to my old craft one that has only 300W. It also has a manual step-less variable temperature of 80-600 degrees Celsius! I was eagerly waiting for its arrival, but at the same time I was really worried that it would scorch my paper.

My new heat gun.

So when it had arrived I put it to the test. I did various embossing powders on various types of card stock, and all in all I was really pleased with the result. It gets really nice and hot, so the actual heat embossing goes really quickly. I do however have to make sure that I don't hold it in the same place for too long, as the paper then will turn brown🔥🧯. Oh, and it is really important to be aware of where I place my fingers😰.

I decided to make a card with the top middle one in the picture, the one with the flock of butterflies flying off.

Birthday card with gold tinsel embossing powder.

The gold embossing powder I have used is Gold Tinsel from Ranger, rangerink.com, and it is a fairly coarse embossing powder. This means that it doesn't melt on smoothly, but is rather rough to the touch, a bit like sand paper.

To me the ultimate test of my new heat gun would be to heat emboss on vellum. I haven't tried that much with my old heat gun as I have struggled to get it warm enough, and have ended up getting a really poor result. Therefore I decided to give it a go and make the whole front of a card out of vellum that was heat embossed. It actually came out really nice! The only thing I would have done differently on this card is that I would have put double sided adhesive on the entire piece of vellum, as smaller strips of double sided adhesive shows through the vellum. On this card I was lucky enough to be able to hide the glue strips behind the flowers.

Birthday card with heat embossed vellum front.