Faux Silver Inlay Chili Peppers
by Anne Harada, Former Guest DesignerSilver Inlay is a popular Southwest art technique used most often in jewelry making. It's a favorite of mine and I own several pieces of silver, onyx, coral and turquoise jewelry made using that style. Google "Inlay Jewelry" and you're pretty much only going to see samples made from artists in the Southwest region.
I wanted to try to capture that look in my card today, so I came up with this technique that I am calling "Faux Silver Inlay" Since obviously I'm not going to use real silver (LOL!), I went with aluminum. Basically I just went to the dollar store and picked up an aluminum roasting pan that is quite large and will yield many many die cuts for my cards!
I started with a 4-1/4" square of some very cool, wood grain style paper from Lori Whitlock's "All About a Boy" collection that came from Frantic Stamper. I used the Frantic Stamper Chili Pepper die to die cut the chili peppers shape out of the center of it. This created a "chili pepper hole" in the middle. I layered the panel over a 4-1/2" square, deep-red cardstock panel. (Insider Tip - save the resulting die cut chili peppers from the wood grain paper for another project!)
Next, from a square of aluminum from my roasting pan, I die cut the chili peppers out of the aluminum. (It cuts effortlessly and beautifully by the way!) I glued the aluminum chili pepper shape inside the "hole" of the wood grain paper panel filling in my "chili pepper hole". You can see below how the red cardstock peeks through some of the details of the chili peppers.
To get the "inlay" look, I ran the whole panel through my die cutting machine, without any die, using the same sandwich as if I were die cutting. This flattens the aluminum image so it is flush with the rest of the paper panel, resulting in the "Faux Silver Inlay" look! (Insider tip - your top sandwich plate needs to be flat; and, if it has lots of embedded cuts, place a layer of plastic packaging between the top of the card and the top sandwich plate so the cuts don't impress onto your aluminum.) Ta Da!! That's it!
I hope you will give this a try, especially with any of the SW Series dies that Frantic Stamper now carries!! I created several more cards using this technique that I'll be sharing later.
Have a great day!
Anne
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