"Painting" embossed images with condensed milk

Kate and Barbara were at it again today! We are stamping maniacs!

We decided to try a technique featured in "The Rubber Stamper"
(April/May 2003), which involved painting an embossed image with
sweetened condensed milk and using a heat gun to carmelize the milk. It
gives a lovely effect, and of course no two images are exactly the same.
Your colors are limited to something that goes with
cream/brown/yellow/rust, though! You can see all of our experiments in
a picture named "Milk_images" at:
http://pg.photos.yahoo.com/ph/drbarb.../ph//my_photos

Stamp an image and emboss it. Then use a paintbrush to paint the inside
of the image with condensed milk. Finally, heat the milk until it
starts to carmelize. Tips we learned:

1) Paint a thin layer. If it's too thick, it just bubbles really thick
like the butterfly in the upper left corner of the picture on the above
web page. The "thick" effect might be good for certain uses or
backgrounds, but we didn't like it so much inside the image. All detail
was lost.
2) Let the milk dry a little before applying heat.
3) Heat slowly. As soon as the milk starts to bubble up, pull away the
heat and let the bubbles settle back down. Then heat again. Pull away.
Repeat until you get the desired level of browning.
4) Directed heat can be used for a shading effect, such as the row of
pumpkins seen on our picture, where I made the top half of the image
darker than the bottom.