Stamping on Tins

A lot of people have had questions for me about how I created the Altoid tins I gave my mom and dad for Christmas this year. It was a lot of fun, so I thought I’d share my experience here.

You can view and comment on the card here, at my gallery on INKblots: Travel Tin.

Copyright Stampin' Up!® 1990-2005

(You may notice that this is the same stamp set as the one I used in the card below.)

The first thing I did in my experiment was spray paint a tin with sliver paint. I covered up all the lettering and nutrition information on the top and bottom of the tin. I then removed the lid from the tin and took a VersaMark ink pad and applied the sticky ink to the top of the tin. I didn’t have any Ultra Thick embossing powder on hand, so used some regular clear embossing powder instead. I sprinkled the first layer on, heated it up with my embossing gun from underneath (using a pair of tweezers to protect my fingers from the hot metal) and then layered a few more coats of clear powder on top (up to four or five layers total). When I had about a 1/8” thickness, I then quickly stamped my images into the warm glaze. I had already inked up my stamps with VersaMark. This was to protect them from sticking to the melted embossing powder. You have to work quickly with this technique, because the embossing powder cools quickly. It’s hard to reheat the powder if it’s close to an image you’ve already stamped. You might lose the image--it will melt away! But if you are careful, you can do it, and even if you melt away some of your image, that might look great that way.

When I was done stamping, I sprayed one final coat of silver lightly over the entire lid. One lid that I created, I used StazOn ink, so the light coating helped to cover a little of the black ink, but not all. That made for a neat antique look.

Reassemble your lid and you are all done! Congratulations. Now you have a nifty little tin that looks like you some how melted the metal and stamped your images into it! Use your tin as a gift for a friend--they‘ll never know that it was once trash. Ha! I put little glass pebble magnets that I hand-stamped into my tins. They stuck to the inside perfectly!