Yay! It’s DIY Wednesday.

Today’s DIY technique is faux letterpress.

What’s letterpress, you ask? Well, my explanation is really dumbed down, but letterpress is a form of printing. Metal blocks are used to print and imprint beautiful designs onto stationary.  

Walk into any small, hip mom & pop stationary store or cool, indie craft fair and you’ll likely find a ton of letterpress cards and prints.

I pretty much go nuts when I spy letterpress stationary. I love the look so this is my faux way of letterpress’ing it.

To pull off this technique, you are going to need:

* Paper drink coasters or Technique Tiles from Technique Tuesday. I prefer the Technique Tiles because they are a bit thicker, but coasters will work.

* A stamp or 2

* An embossing stylus

* Inks (dye and chalk)

* Some kind of sealer.  I am using car wax as my sealer. Curious as to why? Read on, friends. Read on.

Let’s get started.

First, coat your coaster with two colors of chalk ink.

Let the inks sit a minute or so.

Using dye ink, stamp on the coaster with your image.

Let the coaster sit a minute or so.

Take the small end of your embossing stylus and rub it along the image’s lines. Keep rubbing until the image looks like it has a little texture.

Complete any additional stamping to your coaster.

Next, apply a sealant. I’ve used Glossy Accents. It works.  However, for this project here, I don’t want a glossy finish. Instead, I am using CAR Wax. Believe it or not, it totally works.

Rub the wax onto your tile. Your ink will not bleed with this stuff! (It does a little with the Glossy Accents. ) Rub the wax off.

And woolah! The end result is this.  Check out that texture. Oh la la.

Your tile is ready to be used on a project.

Here are two projects I’ve made with this technique.

The base of this bookmark is a Technique Tile from Technique Tuesday. The nice thing about their tiles is they are a bit thicker so it’s a little easier to get texture with the stylus.

 

I used a regular old drink coaster for card. It’s the kind of coaster you’d get at a bar. It took a bit more pressure with the stylus. I didn’t get quite as strong of an impression, but it worked.

Anyway, that’s it for today!

Be back again tomorrow.