Friday, May 1, 2009

Faux Leather Tutorial

A few years ago I learned how to make faux leather. For my first tutorial, I thought this would be good one because it is an easy technique and it is quick to make. You only need 4 items *One piece of brown Foam Sheet that you can buy in a childs craft section *Embossing heat gun *Staz-on black ink *One stamp of your choice. Make sure you have your stamp ready to grab and the top of your ink loosened a bit because later on your going to have to grab them quick. Start by taking your embossing gun and heating one corner of the foam, making sure you heat an area a little bigger then your stamp. Keep the embossing gun moving and you will begin to see the foam turn shiny and start to curl up. It probably will take about 20 seconds or less. When the foam begins to really curl up, take your foam and flip it over. Now heat the other side and it will start to curl up again but quicker than the first side. When your foam has curled and heated, flip it over for the last time and continue heating. This is where you discover if you can do two things at once!! While you are heating the foam to keep it hot, quickly ink up your stamp with the staz-on with your other hand. Now before the foam cools, shut off your embossing heat gun and press your stamp down onto the foam and hold it there for a few seconds. Make sure you do not stamp very close to the edge...leave a bit of room. This is what your image looks like when you are done! It looks like an image was burned into leather. Now take your scissors and make a very small cut to give you a spot to start tearing around the image. You can cut the image out but tearing around the image makes it look more like leather. You are done! Your image is now ready to attach to your card. I used Zots to hold it onto the cardstock. I hope you were able to follow along OK but if you have any questions...please feel free to ask!!

3 comments:

Danni said...

What a neat technique!! Fun tutorial, you did great!

Kim said...

Fantastic Netta. I have seen the results but never the technique. You have done an excellent job on the tutorial and so easy to following along.
And the card turned out great also.

susan55040 said...

Very Neat. I may have to try this one. I did not know you could do that.