It’s Golden

Dressing up a kraft Moleskine notebook is pretty commonplace because it’s just such a great blank slate to work with. Stamping, screen printing and drawing directly onto the notebook were all options I considered, but I decided to emboss the cover.

I bought an embossing heat tool a while ago but had only used it once to test it out (and then I stuck it in a drawer thinking that I would revisit it later). I decided embossing would be a nice way to go for the notebook cover to give it some extra texture and a nice shine to the design.

I wanted the design to be fairly simple and I also wanted to use a stamp that I had already carved. Looking over the stamps I had created, I finally settled on a rejected stylized tree I had created last year. (I say “rejected” because it was a tree that was too abstract; it looked more arrow-like than tree-like, which is why I later created a different tree stamp for the project I was working.) However I thought that this “rejected” stamp could work in this application since it created some nice directional lines.

Using the embossing pad I stamped the notebook, then I applied some gold embossing powder to it and finished by heating the powder until it hardened. While it wasn’t stamped quite perfectly, overall I’m happy with the result (especially since it’s my first time really using embossing in a project).