When I bought my Cricut machine, I was super excited to try out everything it can do… which is a lot. Because I like doing paper crafts like card making, I obviously wanted to try my hand at making cards with my new machine. I love embossing my cards, so wouldn’t it be nice if that were somehow possible with the Cricut as well?

Now, I’m not so great at hand lettering… nope. Eventually I’ll master hand lettering but until then I will just have to use stamps. Or… is there another way?

There is Another Way

The Cricut has a handy little feature that allows you to use a pen, or writing utensil, and it will draw onto your surface anything you like! So how can you heat emboss using a Cricut? Well… you may have heard of embossing pens, especially if you have read my post Embossing For beginners.

Basically, an embossing pen contains embossing ink inside a handy pen. You simply draw or write to your hearts content (or until the ink begins to dry) then, pour on the powder as usual, ext.

I used the Letter It embossing pen with the bullet tip and the Blue glass embossing powder, both made by ranger, for this project. I used the same embossing pen and black embossing powder (Ranger) for my other test project, pictured above.

So all you have to do is simply place the embossing pen into the handy pen attaching area, click the leaver closed and press go!

Problems?

The only hitch to this plan is that you are somewhat limited to the elaborateness of your design due to the drying time of the embossing ink; since the embossing ink needs to be wet in order for the embossing powder to stick. Embossing ink is slower drying than a regular ink but you still need to work fast when you’re trying to emboss. As long as your design isn’t super intricate, it should work just fine though.

However, I did do some experimenting and found a very intricate design on the Cricut Design Space app. As I watched the Cricut draw out my chosen design, I was sure it wasn’t going to work. It was taking so long! I didn’t time it but, if I were to guess, I would say that it took close to two minutes to finish the entire design, which I feel is a long time in embossing world.

When my project finished…

I rushed it over to my work area. I quickly removed it from the mat and poured the embossing powder on top. To my surprise it actually worked! It worked well! The powder stuck to all of the drawn areas and it turned out great.

I also tried using it to write out words and it worked great for that too! This is a great hack for anyone who needs to emboss a personal message or even an intricate design that you can’t find in a stamp.

Go put on your creative cap and get crafting!