{Give it some Zing!} Part 1

Hi all, Jen here! 

I apologise in advance for the poor quality of the photos in this post – my beloved camera took a tumble off the kitchen worktop (courtesy of an inquisitive little boy!) and is now in camera hospital. I am crossing my fingers that it can & will be fixed soon! In the meantime I am having to make do with my phone, and a rather old point & shoot camera, but I wanted to show you these pages anyway. 

This month I’ve been playing with Zing? embossing powders from American Crafts. Over the last several months I have been building up a collection of these, and use them a lot. I love using them to jazz up a page, and wanted to share a few different ways of using the powders on your layouts.

You can find Zing! powders in the shop here:
American Crafts Zing! Embossing Powders
They come in opaque, glitter, metallic and flourescent finishes, and loads of different colours to try out!

First up is this page, featuring a photo from my son’s first birthday, and documenting what a wonderful year it’s been since he arrived into our lives and made our duo a trio! 

This page features a really easy way to add colour and zing to your pages by simply embossing chipboard shapes.  I used a star shape, which I embossed with Mustard Zing, and some asterisks, which were embossed using Rouge Zing both of which have an opaque finish. To do this, simply press the shape into a versamark ink pad, shake the powder all over the now sticky shape and tap off the excess. Heat with a heat gun until the embossing powder does that somewhat magical and mesmerising transformation! I tend to hold my shape with a pair of tweezers by the edges because otherwise they do fly across the room! Because I wanted a really bold look for this page I embossed each shape twice with the same colour, which gives a really good glossy finish without any gaps in it.