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Hand Embossing Custom Printed Place Cards

Hand Embossing Tips

A friend wanted place cards for her daughter’s wedding which would coordinate with the hand made paper of her daughter’s invitations. The paper was very delicate and had rose petals embedded.

She also asked if I could do hand embossing. My response: “Easy as pie … with my Shapeboss Embossing System.”

I mimicked the rose petal embedded paper by creating a background with my scanner, using Print Shop, my favorite graphic design software. (This article provides more information about Print Shop.)

Gather some rose petals; arrange them on the scanner bed; and scan them onto a blank project page. Reduce the tint so the page is light enough to form a subtle background. I used a 30% tint here. Save the project as is. You may want to use the same background again.

To make place cards, start another blank project sheet. Using “Guidelines, set up the page to print “four-up” (four place cards to a page). (Learn how to work with Guidelines).

Insert the rosebud background image and size it as desired, lining it up to your guidelines.

Copy and paste to fill the four place card spaces.

I used the “Headline Tool” and chose the AmazoneBT font for its elegance combined with legibility.

The “Headline Tool” is especially handy when you want to personalize cards or name tags. For one thing, you can easily create fancy shadows and effects, but also it’s simple to edit to change the name and then resize to fit the space simply by pulling the corner arrows.

For example, if you start with “Madeline” and then want to print “Kim” you should reduce the size of the headline block so that “Kim” doesn’t appear to shout from the page. I used a metallic outline and a pale pink shadow with this font to achieve the appearance of depth.

You can make your place cards two-sided as I did by copying each name, centering it on the upper half of the card, then flipping the headline box both horizontally and vertically.

Print out your first page of four names. Then edit each card to insert four new names, and so on.

The high and consistent quality of embossing you can do with Shapeboss is simple and fast due to Shapeboss’ double template method. No blind embossing, no slips. (Read my review of the Shapeboss System.)

I used the ”Heritage” template set and selected part of a flourish pattern to form the embossed borders on my place cards.

Embossing Tips

Tip 1

Decide where you want the embossing and position your project between the templates. If it lines up with gridlines on two sides, great. Use the gridlines to position each copy.

If it doesn’t line up well, mark your place with one or two strips of tape as shown below.

Cut out the place cards. Use a straightedge and scoring implement to score a line down the center.

Then fold and crease using a bone folder or other smooth implement.

Notice that creasing and folding is done before the embossing. If you try to do the embossing first, when you go to fold and crease, you risk flattening your embossed images.

Tip 2

Hold the stylus as upright as possible to achieve the same depth and distance from the edge all around each shape as shown below.

Here is an article to help you learn more about making your own computer graphic backgrounds.

Feel free to use any of my designs. Just click on one you like and save it to your hard drive.

For more on using your computer for making unique crafts, visit Computer Crafting, the gateway to all computer related articles on The Artful Crafter.

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