Pink Elephant Challenge 7

Wow it's Monday and that means a new challenge at the Pink Elephant. As many of you will know we have just had a very special weekend and I do hope that everyone who took part in the Easter Blog Hop really enjoyed it - I know I did.

I will be announcing the winner of my Hero Arts Blog Candy later but right now let me tell you about this week's challenge. It's a fantastic sketch by the supremely talented Robin - oh my have you seen her work? Amazing - do stop by her blog, Robin's Artful Musings and take a look - you will not be disappointed.

This week I decided to transform a plain notebook I bought in a sale recently. I really need a book to store all the sketches I use by the Pink Elephant team and the ones from other challenge blogs too. I think the sketches are way too good to only use once, but if I do use them in the future I want to be able to give whoever designed them the credit they deserve on my blog.

As you can see on Robin's sketch the large area is embossed and as my note book is quite a lot larger than a Cuttlebug folder I had to cheat a little to cover the area necessary.

I thought this may be a technique that some crafters may not have seen before so I decided to do a little tutorial showing how I get round embossing a large area.

First of all cut your card to the size you require and then place it in the embossing folder so that as much of the area is embossed as possible. As you can see in the photo luckily the width of my card fit the embossing folder, but not the length.

The next part is a little trickier - you need to turn the embossing folder and line up one or two sets of dots (depending on how the pattern falls) that have already been embossed so that they will be embossed again alongside the remaining card area.

This technique will not work with all embossing folders, but as you will see is fantastic for using with the Swiss Dots folder.

When you remove the card from the folder you will see that because of the flat part of the folder one line of dots has become flattened.

This is easy to remedy.

Turn the card over and lay on a piece of foam - I use my pricking mat. Then carefully using a fine ball tool emboss the holes back in again by rolling the tool gently where the embossing was before.

When you have completed each one turn the card over and as you can see the embossing is very effective and it is hard to tell where the join is.

I also sanded my embossing to make the dots pop even more.

This is the finished book showing the elasticated page marker in place.