Score/Emboss/Deboss with the Silhouette Curio!

I haven't bought a silhouette curio for myself yet but I was fortunate enough to have a friend who let me borrow one just to play with! We were having trouble figuring out how to emboss cardstock (65lb Recollections from Michaels) and a lot of blogs so far have done only vellum.

After watching a demo video, we have realized what we were missing/doing wrong in order to get the best embossing/debossing look and feel! We weren't scoring the page!!! Keep reading and I will show some examples of what I mean and I hope I can do it without recording a video of me explaining what I did. Well, let's get to it!

Initial try: No scoring used

Our first try with embossing/debossing feature didn't go so well. We were underwhelmed with how the embossing/debossing  looked on heavy cardstock. We had looked online and saw the sample photos of how crisp the lines were and I was determined to figure out why ours looked like the below.

(insert picture of paper here)

Debossing with no fill

Debossing with fill

As you can see above, the lines are not crisp and we even used a fill to try to get it to work. The edges are rounder than I would have liked and the imprint of the cloud looked very light in some areas. Little did we know we were missing something important!

Second Try: Scoring with blade 1

After watching a demo video, we noticed that people were scoring the paper beforehand so we decided to give that a try. We set our scoring blade to 1 and default for everything else and it cut through our card stock and the embossing mat. *sad face*

Ripped mat. Luckily it still works fine

Ripped paper and mat using a recommended scoring blade set to 1

Scoring at blade 1 for 65lb Recollections cardstock

Third Try: Scoring with blade ZERO

Since the paper was cutting through, I decided to change the blade to ZERO and changed the thickness of the embossing tool to 20 (I do think leaving it as default will be okay). After making that change, we were able to get a nice embossed look on the cardstock!! So if you are wondering if the curio can do it, it CAN! I highly recommend putting your blade on ZERO for 65lb card stock and working your way up so you don't mess up your mat like we did.

Score and deboss with no fill

Score and deboss with fill

Score and deboss with fill and double lines

As you can see, we tried different fills and all of them have different looks. The curio can definitely be pushed to make a lot of different variations and I now need my own machine.

 Score and deboss with fill

                                             Score and deboss with fill and double lines