Chalkboard Technique Question
 

I want to make some chalkboard Christmas cards, so I've been looking at tutorials. In all but one, the directions say to stamp and emboss with white embossing powder. It seems that doing this would make the image bright white instead of looking like actual chalk on a chalkboard. Is there a reason to emboss? For instance, does embossing the image keep it from smearing when applying the "chalk dust" afterwards? Or is it a matter of personal preference? Thanks for any light you can shed on this!

I think embossing is recommended because white inks generally don't give you sufficient coverage on black cardstock. Smudging around with a white pencil and white ink afterwards gives a sufficiently "chalk board" look while the embossing makes your stamping easy to see/read.

I'm adding a sample tag so you can see the effects of the different media - white embossing powder for the sentiment with a white pencil "shadow" around it and white ink smudged on the edges of the tag (watermark from the sadly defunct Papercrafts magazine because it's their photography rather than mine on this, they happened to feature it on a blog post promoting a feature in the mag).

http://cimg1.ibsrv.net/gimg/www.spli...64e3162320.jpg

Try it both ways and see which you prefer! There is such a wide variety in white inks and how well they cover on dark cardstock - the embossing powder probably just removes some of that margin of error.

Here's a thread where we talked about our favorite white inks - that might give you some indication of how a 'just stamped' image would look:

http:////www.splitcoaststampers.com/...k-t581199.html

Joanne, thank you for your input--and for posting a picture of your beautiful tag! Dina, thank you for the link to the thread about white inks! I have a couple of different white inkpads, as well as white embossing powder. Guess I'll do some experimenting with the inks, with and without embossing powder. Thank you both so much!