The embossing process used in the creation of some of your fancier wedding invitations and business cards is an interesting one. It’s often called thermography or thermographic printing. Slow-drying, wet ink is applied to a substrate. The ink is dusted with a thermoplastic polymer called embossing powder, and a heat source raises the ink while drying it.

Commercial embossing powder costs about $10 an ounce. As [Ken] discovered, its manufacture is quite closed-source to boot. He set about creating his own embossing powder, and succeeded with a combination of commonly available floor finish and distilled white vinegar. A standard-sized bottle of floor finish yielded about four ounces of homemade embossing powder.

How does this work? The floor finish is an acrylic-based stable emulsion. Adding vinegar destabilizes the emulsion, decreasing its pH and setting the polymer free.  It’s a fairly fast process, which you can see in the second video that accompanies [Ken]’s write up. From there, it’s mostly a matter of straining the material, letting it dry, and pulverizing the coarse matter into powder. In the first video, [Ken] performs a comparison test of Ranger, a commercial powder, and his own concoction.

For a completely different take on home embossing, check out this soda-can-turned-keepsake-box.