Graduation Cards

Hello Blog friends!

Today I have a couple cards to show you.

My hubby wanted a graduation card to send

to the son of one of his artist friends, so he asked

me to make one.

Here is what I came up with.

I started with the Abstract Triangle stencil from 

Simon Says Stamp and used Distress Inks and applied them

with blending brushes, I use make up brushes and they work great.

(Weathered Wood, Stormy Sky, Blueprint Sketch)

I then cut the panel down to size and adhered it to

a white card base.

The sentiment is from my stash.

I followed the same procedure with this card, but used

a stencil from Heidi Swap, I can't find a name on it or

anywhere on her site.  Sorry.
For this one I used Stormy Sky and Blueprint Sketch

Distress Inks.

Inside I stamped this sentiment.

It's an old stamp from my stash and I have no

idea where I got it.  
I did a little stamp surgery on this one.

Originally it says something like

"If you love what you do"

above  "the whole world"

I just cut them apart and if I want

to use the whole thing I'll just piece it

back together again to stamp it.

I love this sentiment for a graduation card.

Thanks for stopping by today,

I hope you'll come again soon.

Until then:

Happy Stamping!

Note the links are only to give a reference so you can

see what the products are.
I didn't necessarily purchase from these sites,

except where specified,

and you may find better prices elsewhere,

I am in no way promoting any particular site.

Foiling with an iron

Hello all!

My last post was about foiling.

I wrote at the end of the post that I would try using

a household iron to foil some embellishments 

and report back on how that worked.

Here is that review.

I chose 2 of the pieces from the Heidi Swapp assortment

that I used in my other post.

I used the same foils as I did with my last post

when I used the laminator.

I set the iron on the hottest setting WITHOUT steam.

I applied quite a bit of pressure on the iron, as much

as I could muster for about 15 seconds.

Here is the result with the Heidi Swapp foil.

It worked fair, there were some spots that the foiling 

did not stick and you can see that the heat from the iron 

kind of 'warped' the rest of the foil.

I used the same process with the Color Foil piece.

The results weren't quite as good.

But the foil didn't become warped at all.

You can see what was left behind rather than sticking to the

black area of the embellishment.

Now I don't know if I had used more pressure or longer

heating time, if it would have done better,

but there are the results.

Here, up closer you can see where the foil didn't stick

and here as well.

My conclusion,

it is possible to use a household iron, but the results isn't

near as good as using the laminator.

Could I have 'fixed' the problem by adding more foil

and ironing again?

Probably, but I didn't try that.

I'll just use my laminator.

Now I'm wondering if the foil would do well in my heat

press, but I won't be heating it up just to give it a try.

Maybe when I've got that baby fired up again, I'll try it.

My guess is that it will work better than the iron,

only because it has good pressure, but would it ruin the

other areas of the foil?

That's the question.

If I give it a try, I'll write about it in a future post.

Thanks for stopping in today,

hope this 'review' helps you in some way.

Let me know if you give foiling a try and how 

it works out for you.

Until next time, Happy Crafting!

Foiling

Hello craft lovers!

Have you tried foiling yet?

I decided to jump on the bandwagon and give it a try.

I already have a laminator, so that covers the most expensive

part of this latest trend.

The foil can be a little pricey, but I found some on clearance at

Michael's, then I found some other supplies on clearance and 

that made me do a happy dance.

Here are some of the basics for foiling.

Heidi Swapp has these sets of embellishments for foiling.

I usually wouldn't buy something like this,

but since they were on clearance for $1.29 I thought I'd

give them a try.

Here are all the pieces I got in that little pack.

Where ever you see black, it is toner and the foil will stick to 

it when put through the laminator.

There is a "craft laminator" called a Minc that is specifically 

made for this technique, but I'm pretty sure any laminator will do.

The biggest thing is to be sure whatever you are foiling

has toner on it.

It will NOT work if you try to foil anything from an ink jet printer.

You MUST use a laser printer if you are making your own

pieces to foil. If you don't have a laser printer, like me, you 

can have things printed at a copy store, such as Office Max.

Just remember it must be TONER for the foil to stick.

While looking for places online to purchase 

"toner reactive foil" my friend and I found

ColorFoils.com

I found that they offered a free sampling of their foils,

and requested them.

They sent me a great variety of  20 foils to try out.

I thought I'd see if there was any differences between the

Heidi Swapp foil and the Color Foils foil.

I chose 2 of the embellishments from the Heidi Swapp 

packet that I purchased.

I cut off a piece of the Heidi Swapp foil as the sheet

was too wide to fit both pieces into my carrier.

The right is the Color Foil piece in red.

the left is a piece of pink from Heidi Swapp.

Next the carrier is sent through the laminator.

Be sure it is warmed up.

If you haven't used a laminator before,

you simply place the carrier into the machine, it

'grabs' onto it and pulls it through.

My laminator runs from the front to the back,

the carrier goes through the machine and 

exits the back.

Here is what I found when it came out the back of the

laminator.  You can see that the foil shifted on the left.

This was partly my fault, I cut the piece narrow, but large enough

to cover the embellishment, but didn't give it much

extra. The other problem was that the Heidi Swapp foil

comes rolled up in a tube.  when you try to lay it flat, 

it tends to roll up, guess I didn't have it laying flat when I closed

the carrier, so be aware of this.

As you can see, the entire piece wasn't covered.

This isn't a problem though.

The part that was covered came out perfect.

Here is the piece that I used the Color Foil sheet on.

As you can see it came our beautifully.

Anything left on that sheet can be used for another project.

Now to fix my other piece.

All I needed to do was cover the black area with the foil

and run it through the laminator again.

Here is a close up of the red Color Foil piece.

You can see it came out beautifully.

This is permanent and doesn't peel or scratch off.

Once I ran this through a second time, it was 

ready to be used on a project.

The only problem I found was you can see where the foil 

overlapped at the bottom of the piece.

When I put it back through the laminator,

it left a kind of imprint where the foil had already

been removed from the sheet.

It isn't really all that obvious when you look at it 

in real life, but at the right angle it can be seen.

In the future, I just wouldn't overlap it.

All in all, I think both the foils worked great.

I did prefer the finish on the Color Foil piece.

Not that there was anything wrong with the other

one, the finish was just a bit smoother.

I will have to play around with it more to see if

I find that I prefer it on a whole, or if it just

happened to be this color, or possibly that it had run 

one through the laminator twice.

If you haven't tried foiling yet, give it a try.

It really can add a bit of something special to a project.

I've read that you can do this with a household iron,

but you do need to use a lot of  pressure to get a good 

results. I'll give it a try and post my results in the near 

future.

Thanks for stopping by today, I hope you'll give

foiling a try.

Let me know how it works out for you, I'd love to

see what you make.

Until next time, Happy Crafting!