Within the crafting world, one of the hottest trends has been the combination of rubber-stamping, inks, and embossing powders. I think who ever came up with this method was inspired by something everyone did in grade school, were something was traced with a bead of glue and then had glitter dumped all over it. The excess glitter was then knocked off, leaving the traced object enhanced by the glitter. When using rubber-stamps, the process is quite similar. Slow-drying inks, usually labeled as suitable for embossing, are applied to the stamp and then the paper. The embossing powder is sprinkled over the top, with the excess knocked off onto a spare, clean sheet of paper. (This allows for the recovery of excess powder so it can be used again in a later project.) A heat gun or similar device is then used to melt the powder and ink together. There are a number of different finish types available within powders, ranging from simple metallic, glitter types, to multi-color prismatic.
My thought, upon seeing the technique the first time, was how to combine that with use of my ink-jet printer. Unfortunately, my printer, like most ink-jet printers, uses fast drying inks to avoid smears. Most of the time, this suits me just fine, as I would not want a smeared output. The challenge here is that the ink must stay wet long enough for the powder to stick. After much experimentation, I found a variety of techniques to accomplish this aim to work depending on the printer type.
