Fiskas Shape Boss is the must have craft item, it comes complete with a versatile stencil and embossing tool
plus handy little pegs to keep your stencils in place, I found these particularly helpful as you can remove them and replace them in the prepared holes when using different size card blanks, which means you can emboss wherever you want to on a card blank HOORAY!

I found the shape boss to be quite addictive and although it can be time consuming the finished look is subtlety at the very best level, an absolutely astonishing finish that will certainly make your heart melt.

You can use just about any board or paper, I tried everything I used the Shapeboss directly onto our fab cream 280 gsm card blank it worked a treat you do need to press just a little harder than if you were using paper or a light weight board, however not so much pressure as to make your arm hurt.

I particularly liked using pencils to colour in just a smidgen along the top of the embossing.

 

 

 

However, I found Mirror board looked the most effective.

 

 

 

The stencils are so versatile as you can maneuver the card or paper to create a multiple design by cleverly over laying one heart on to the corner of another which creates a rather sweet entwined heart image picture here please

 

 

 

 

Using pearl white board I created this rather special wedding invitation using the alphabet stencil.

The alphabet is probably my favorite as it is so versatile you can write any word you desire with few limitations, a good tip when using the alphabet stencil is to write the word you are going to emboss then lay it flat on the table using a mirror to show the reverse image as the letters need to be embossed back to front which is tricky to fathom without the use of the mirror

So on the whole I rather enjoyed the Shapeboss and came up with some rather fun ideas, I thought I should judge it against something similar so I took our faithful old Sizzix machine home with a converter kit and embossing stencils and had a play.

It does the embossing for you which is quite handy as it is very quick, if you were doing a bulk project this would be the way to go as it would save a lot of time, however it is quite restrictive in what you can do with it.

The machine can only take a rather small piece of card (up to approx. 120 mm wide) this is OK if you plan to cut the embossed piece down and mount it, however it's not really practical for card making when it can't emboss the front of even a C6 card!

It's still a good system and you can make some perfectly embossed cards with it.

So the final score Shapeboss 9 Sizzix embosser 6