Scrapbook Tutorial: Jazz up Your Basic Brads

Jazz up your basic brads and make them look like shiny glass stones.

MATERIALS NEEDED:

Basic metal scrapbooking brads
Heat Embossing Gun
Tweezers
Pigment Ink
UTEE (Ultra Thick Embossing Enamel by Melt Art)
Tray to catch the UTEE





Holding the brad with tweezers, ink the top of your colored brad and around the top edges with the same color of pigment ink. Be sure to completely and heavily ink the top surface and top edges of the brad. For the blue brad, I used a slightly darker blue shade of ink for the blue brad because I wanted a deeper blue to match a layout.

Pour UTEE over the top of the brad and use your heat embossing gun to heat up the UTEE. Please make sure you use tweezers to hold the brad as you use your heat embossing gun as it gets super hot! As soon as the UTEE starts to bubble and gloss over, while the UTEE on the brad is still warm, pour more UTEE over the top of the brad and heat again. Two coats of UTEE is usually all you need to get a smooth shiny surface.


The blue and red brads on the top are the original brads. The blue and redbrads on the bottom are the finished product.


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For a natural glass stone look, start with a white brad and using brown pigment ink, barely sponge the top of the brad, the darker the sponging the darker the stone will look. You don't want to cover the entire surface with the brad. The following example is the original white brad on the left and the brad next to it has been lightly sponged with brown pigment ink.



Pour UTEE over the top of the brad and use your heat embossing gun to heat up the UTEE. As soon as the UTEE starts to bubble and gloss over, while the UTEE on the brad is still warm, pour more UTEE over the top of the brad and heat again. Two coats of UTEE is usually all you need to get a smooth shiny surface.

The following picture is the original white brad, the middle brad was lightly inked before the UTEE was applied, and the far right brad was inked a little heavier before adding the UTEE.



White brads are always handy to have on hand as you can ink these brads any color of your choice to coordinate with your layout.

And here are the red and brown stone brads on a layout...